Who created STAT Trials Pulse ?
STAT News and Applied XL have partnered to bring you STAT Trials Pulse. Applied XL brings to the table an experienced team of computational journalists and engineers who specialize in real-time information processing. STAT builds on its track record of telling compelling stories in health and medicine to inform and train Applied XL’s clinical trials algorithm. By combining the precision of data science with the high standards of journalism, we’ve unlocked a powerful new way to surface the most relevant updates in the clinical trials space.
Why was this product launched?
In March 2020, Applied XL and STAT News joined forces to track Covid-19 by aggregating multiple data sources from around the world and making them available through a dashboard that has since received over 2.7 million visits. Seeing first-hand the impact of this effort, the two teams developed a plan to monitor not only the disease but the new treatment landscape for Covid — initially taking the form of a data investigation authored by STAT senior writer Matt Herper and Applied XL’s Erin Riglin.
“Being able to visualize and track the data embedded deep in clinicaltrials.gov gave me a whole new perspective on what we could learn from this resource that I’d used for so many years,” Herper said. “It was clear that there was a resource here that could be useful to scientists, businesspeople, investors, and journalists.”
We interviewed over 65 life sciences professionals and surveyed hundreds more to understand their information needs. The biggest takeaway: professionals in this space were overwhelmed with unstructured clinical trials data, and as a result were missing out on critical information that they needed to do their jobs. In fact, we found that they spend almost 75% of their time looking for data, and only 25% of their time making sense of that information to make decisions. With our background in computational journalism, we knew we could build a tool that would change this — that is, one that would do the heavy lifting of finding and contextualizing the data for these professionals, so they could focus on the work that really matters.
As one of our users put it, “Surfacing what other companies are doing can save us half of our time. This extra time can be used to spend on implications to business and readjusting our timelines.”
How does STAT Trials Pulse work?
STAT Trials Pulse uses machine learning and natural language processing algorithms to detect and make sense of millions of data points in the clinical trials space. The algorithms are then fine-tuned through input by journalists and other life science experts, reflecting our commitment to responsible AI and high algorithmic standards. The result combines cutting-edge data science techniques with editorial principles, providing you with objective, fast, and reliable information.
The system navigates the infoscape for life sciences data and consciously detects what's new and noteworthy.
- We monitor and structure all data from clinicaltrials.gov, PubMed, scientific papers, and press releases.
- Our algorithms are encoded with prioritization and editorial labeling frameworks that have been developed by a network of in-industry experts, including STAT journalists, that help surface important signals and de-prioritize noise.
- The product minimizes setup and increases the relevance of the information users receive, helping us to flag the most important shifts in the trials they’re watching. However, the full feed of data is always available for the end user to explore in depth.