Patients Know Best has collaborated with Heartfelt Technologies to automate and accelerate clinical trial recruitment, by taking a digital-first approach to patients.
Using Patients Know Best to recruit patients for Heartfelt Technologies’ Innovate UK-funded HF-TRACK trial, the approach has significantly accelerated enrolment, demonstrating how a patient-led, automated process can outperform traditional methods.
In a concentrated four-week window, the digital-first approach overcame typical recruitment challanges by informing and enabling eligible patients to easily connect with life-changing research opportunities.
Heartfelt Technologies is currently conducting the HF-TRACK clinical trial to validate its groundbreaking non-contact monitoring system. The technology uses proprietary 3D sensing and AI to automatically monitor patients for peripheral oedema – a key indicator of worsening heart health – simply as they walk past the device in their home. This passive monitoring aims to identify symptoms up to two weeks before a potential heart event, allowing for early medical intervention and the prevention of emergency hospitalisations.
Patients are typically non-adherent, may have additional illnesses and are simply overwhelmed by their medical regime. Heartfelt Technologies has designed a device to easily and passively monitor a patient’s foot volume and hopefully prevent unnecessary emergency admissions.
The company noted “this is a hard to reach and hard to serve population to enrol in a clinical trial. Historically, recruiting this type of participant for clinical trials has been a slow and difficult process, often relying on manual identification by busy clinical teams. This programme utilised coded data within the PKB platform to identify trials that are relevant to a patient’s health. Patients see these trials in their PKB account. If a patient wishes, they can put themselves forward for consideration, and share their health records with the research team, to learn more and complete enrolment.”
The power of this digital-first approach was evidenced by recruiting 16 patients within four weeks of the programme’s launch. 1,251 patients saw the banner for the research and 53 clicked to learn more; of those, 69% then shared their records with the research team. 16 patients then enrolled in the trial, equivalent to a recruitment rate 135% higher than the trial-wide average. Notably, this acceleration occurred within HF-TRACK, which was already one of the fastest-recruiting trials for heart failure patients. The rapid surge in high-intent applications demonstrates the efficiency of using personal health records to connect the right patients with the right research at the right time.
Dr Oriane Chausiaux, chief scientific officer at Heartfelt Technologies [pictured right], noted: “Working with Patient Knows Best to recruit participants for our HF-TRACK clinical trial has been a really positive experience. The platform makes it easier to identify people who might be interested in taking part, while giving them clear information so they can decide for themselves if they’d like to learn more. This approach has helped us connect quickly and directly with patients who are engaged and interested in contributing to research that aims to improve patient outcomes and prevent heart failure hospitalisations.”
Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli, CEO and founder of Patients Know Best, added: “We are delighted to help more patients more quickly discover and more easily take part in Heartfelt Technologies’ important research. By informing patients directly and enabling them to share their own records, we give them the agency to decide if they want to take part in research. This approach allows healthcare organisations to reach a much broader, more diverse audience who might not typically be invited to trials, making clinical research more equitable and accessible for everyone. Since conducting the project in September 2025 we have doubled the number of patients with their full medical records so can match the trials to over 3 million so we can help others more quickly.”
Wider trend: Digital transformation
Patients Know Best has been selected to provide a single patient record system for the Government of Lagos State in Nigeria, forming part of a partnership between Interswitch Group and the government to introduce the Lagos Smart Health Information Platform.
In July, Patients Know Best launched a population health management engine to support the NHS in accelerating clinical trials. Designed to support NHS organisations and clinical research organisations in accelerating clinical trial recruitment, the new capability aims to assist in meeting new government targets set for March 2026.
For a recent HTN Now webinar, we were joined by Neill Crump, digital strategy director at Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust; Ananya Datta, associate director of primary care digital delivery at South East London ICS; and John Kosobucki, CEO of OX.DH. In the session, we discussed how health and care can tackle challenges around interoperability, looking at the key steps that can be taken to make progress in this area. Our expert panellists shared details about their own projects and programmes, providing insights into strategy, approaches and potential improvements that can be made.
