YASHA LIM
PRODUCT MANAGER
Data & Research
Original brief
"Clinical trials still ask patients, clinicians, research sites, sponsors and CROs to hold a fragmented system together by hand. Eligibility gets checked on paper. Referrals lose momentum at every hand-off. A patient who would have been a perfect match never hears the study exists."
Research Summary
I treated the brief as a hypothesis and used desktop research to test whether the underlying problem was real. The research validated the core problem: clinical-trial recruitment in Australia is fragmented and heavily reliant on manual coordination. There has been reviews conducted in which fewer than 30% of eligible patients were offered trials.
The research gave me enough confidence that there is a meaningful problem space around discovery → eligibility → referral, while also identifying the assumptions I would want to validate with clinicians, trial coordinators and patients before committing to a solution.
Common User Journey
Trial Awareness
PatientClinician
↓
Patient Participant Identification
PatientClinician
↓
Preliminary Matching or Screening
ClinicianCoordinator
↓
Referral
Clinician
↓
Referral Review
Coordinator
↓
Formal Screening (Clinical)
Clinical team
↓
Consent
Patient
↓
Enrolment
Trial team
Most Frequent Frustration
0%20%40%60%
Eligibility screen failure
5–60%
Patient withdrawal
5–30%
Trials closed early
5–15%
Incomplete referral info
10–50%*
Unacknowledged referrals
Evidence gap — no quantitative rate
*Illustrative inferred range. All confidence ratings in the source are Low; several values are single-context observations or evidence gaps rather than national estimates.
Research Limitations: The two-day timeframe meant this phase was limited to desktop research. My next step would have been qualitative research with trial sites and customers, supported by product analytics and CRM data to validate where the biggest problems occur in practice.
