Northwestern Medicine announced on June 18 a collaboration with Vizlitics, a healthcare artificial intelligence company, to implement next-generation AI tools for cancer clinical trial recruitment and real-world data management.
Over the past two years, Northwestern Medicine has supported Vizlitics’ development of AI-powered solutions by providing oncology expertise, real-world clinical insights, and a pilot environment. Vizlitics led the design and development of these products to integrate into existing clinical and research workflows.
The collaboration, backed by support from a National Institute of Health Small Business Innovation Research Phase II contract, resulted in Northwestern Medicine activating Vizlitics’ Clinical Trial and Real World Data products. The organizations say this milestone aims to improve trial matching, streamline research operations, and expand access to clinical trials for patients with cancer.
“Clinical trial participation remains one of the most challenging areas in oncology, driven in large part by fragmented data systems and manual workflows,” said Deva Mahalingam, MD, PhD, Associate Director of Clinical Research at Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at Northwestern Medicine. “Through our collaboration with Vizlitics, we were able to apply real-world oncology expertise directly into product development and deployment within a live clinical environment. Implementing this technology enables earlier identification of eligible patients, reduces operational burden on research teams, expands access to clinical trials, and helps generate research-grade structured clinical data at scale.”
Vizlitics’ platform uses artificial intelligence to curate longitudinal patient data from unstructured records such as faxes and media files while automatically pre-screening patients for eligibility prior to their consultation. The tools are designed for seamless integration into health system workflows by screening more than 95% of patients before their appointments. Structured patient data extracted includes information about screening status, diagnosis details, treatments received or planned, comorbidities present during care journey stages, as well as outcomes.
“Our collaboration with Northwestern Medicine shows how health systems and Digital Health AI companies can co-create solutions faster together using a confluence of clinical data workflow automation and responsible AI to address challenges clinicians and researchers face every day,” said Tarun Kumar, co-founder and CEO of Vizlitics. “Northwestern Medicine's oncology expertise, clinician feedback, and rigorous pilot environment helped us build two clinically validated solutions with measurable impact—accelerating patient-to-trial matching, reducing manual screening burden, and turning unstructured clinical records into structured research-ready insights at scale. We're excited to see both products activated and to keep working together to make clinical trials more accessible and research operations more efficient.”
Northwestern Medicine functions under its parent organization Northwestern Memorial HealthCare; it engages in strategic collaborations like this one to advance clinical research education while aiming for world-class care through its mission focused on patient care, education, and research, according to the official website. Howard B. Chrisman is president and chief executive officer.
