About ACT

Research often begins with questions, inspired by data discovered through exploration. Without tools to explore large patient data sets and health conditions impacting patient populations, important questions may remain unanswered.

Accrual to Clinical Trials (ACT) is a national network that enables researchers to gauge research protocol feasibility and cohort discovery in real-time, by querying aggregate electronic health record data.

ACT is a collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh, Harvard University, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and University of California San Diego, with member sites across the country.

Team members from the University of Pittsburgh are leading this project and created the ontology that describes and organizes the networked health data.

Engineering team members from Harvard Catalyst adapted the SHRINE platform to enable users to query aggregate counts of patient health records based on selected query criteria.

UT Southwestern and UCSD provided additional project leadership, coordination, and support vital to the network operations.

ACT has connected 42 sites nationally (with more than 15 sites preparing to join), giving researchers access to aggregate data of over 125 million patient health records with regional diversity, while maintaining important standards of privacy and security.