Case Study: Wake Forest Baptist Health matches cancer patients to clinical trials with Google for Education

Wake Forest Baptist Health builds chatbot to match cancer patients with clinical trials

Wake Forest Baptist Health worked with Google for Education to address a major challenge in cancer care: helping patients find and enroll in clinical trials, especially during the pandemic when access to care was increasingly remote. With no single comprehensive source for U.S. clinical trials and many studies struggling to recruit enough participants, the health system needed a better way to match patients to available research opportunities. The team used Google Cloud and Dialogflow, Google’s natural language processing tool, to create a patient-facing chatbot.

Google for Education, working with Quantiphi, helped Wake Forest Baptist Health build a chatbot that asks patients screening questions, explains clinical terms, and uses natural language understanding to match users with relevant trials in real time. The tool launched in May 2020 for lung, breast, liver, pancreatic, colorectal, and prostate cancer trials, and can also route patients to a live adviser or clinician appointment. While the case study does not cite a specific numeric outcome, it reports that the chatbot improved trial discovery and screening, and the team continues expanding it to more cancers and additional languages.

Wake Forest Baptist Health

Umit Topaloglu

Associate Professor of Cancer Biology and Associate Director of Informatics