ZotGPT Chat is a safe place for UCI to grow AI capabilities
In January of this year, UC Irvine introduced ZotGPT Chat to faculty and staff–a customized generative artificial intelligence solution designed to enhance the academic institution’s technological capabilities. The AI tool, tailored for the UCI community, will extend access to students later this year. The source code for ZotGPT is now available to all UC campuses to help jumpstart similar efforts across the University of California.
Background
ZotGPT Chat is a step toward safe, secure, and custom AI usage within academia. It stands out in the UC system as a pioneering solution that ensures personal and institutional data remain confidential, shielding them from external vendors that might otherwise use such sensitive information to train their models – a common concern with commercial AI offerings.
With its conversational capabilities, document analysis, and mobile-friendly design, ZotGPT Chat is part of the larger ZotGPT gen AI suite on campus, which includes an expanding portfolio of vendor solutions. This AI initiative aligns with UCI’s commitment to fostering an innovative environment by providing wide-ranging access to the latest technology, while ensuring robust security and support. It was developed by the OIT AI Workgroup at UCI: Sarkis Daglian, Max Garrick, Chris Price, Sylvia Bass, Ray Vadnais, Jeff Picco, Joshua Drummond, and Gary Arzumanyan. Support was provided by various other groups and individuals on campus including Pat Lemon, Trevor Day, Warren Leung, and Mark Scarbrough.
UCI’s Vice Chancellor for Data and Information Technology, Tom Andriola, underscores the significance of ZotGPT. “We’re not just equipping our community with cutting-edge tools; we’re bringing in the right frameworks to securely and responsibly harness AI for teaching, research, and improving workflows,” he stated.
Future of ZotGPT Chat
The platform’s features are steadily expanding, with internet-enabled responses, image generation, and customizable chatbots on the horizon. Notably, ZotGPT Chat is expected to empower faculty and staff to integrate its capabilities into their own software for innovative research endeavors.
Current projects include:
ScholarConnect: ZotGPT can make it easier for the world to discover our faculty and their cutting-edge research. The tool can extract and organize information from faculty CVs, enabling uses like highlighting their research interests, honors, awards, recent publications, and more. It will launch at the end of 2024.
Nicotine cessation bot: Professor Ian Harris of the UCI Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science and Professor Connie Pechmann of the Paul Merage School of Business are leveraging ZotGPT chat to design a bot that will help those experiencing nicotine addiction.
ZotDesk: The Office of Information Technology (OIT) is implementing a chatbot to facilitate help desk requests and streamline routine IT support. It is expected to launch Fall 2024.
ZotGPT Chat currently has 1,796 unique users and is trending to 200 daily users. To increase adoption and highlight popular use cases, the ZotGPT team is beginning to hold webinars and training sessions for faculty and staff.
The Office of Data and Information Technology and the ANTrepreneur Center are pleased to announce the launch of The Hub Info Sessions – a series of events for UCI students offering a deep dive into the latest technology. The info sessions are held monthly at the ANTrepreneur Center on Tuesday evenings and always conclude with tacos and networking.
Intended to increase access to experiential learning, these monthly gatherings feature presentations and workshops by The Hub’s tech partners including ServiceNow, AWS, Soul Machines, Microsoft, Udemy, Siemens, Salesforce and many other industry leaders. Speakers showcase their platforms’ capabilities, discuss career paths for new grads, and provide unique educational opportunities through certifications and badging.
The first session kicked off with an informative presentation by experts Tim Raymond and Trey Hemmingsen of ServiceNow. In addition to showcasing the jobs available today across Fortune 500 companies for candidates with knowledge of their software, they provided all students with access to NowLearning, a comprehensive learning platform tailored for ServiceNow.
The excitement continues with the next Hub Info Session featuring AWS (Amazon Web Services) slated for February 27 at 5 p.m. Industry veterans Ed Cadow and Mike Glover will share their insights as they cover opportunities within AWS, the path to getting AWS credits, the cutting-edge realm of AI, and much more.
This series is a fantastic avenue to access the latest technology, attain coveted certifications, savor tasty tacos, practice networking and walk away with exclusive swag.
“The concept of The Hub is to complement classroom learning with the opportunity for our students to acquire marketable skills on the latest technologies, and get experiential learning assignments working on real world problems while they are students here at UC Irvine,” said Vice Chancellor for IT and Data Tom Andriola. “The Hub Info Sessions are more than just educational events; they are a powerful catalyst for our students to learn how to enhance their academic achievements with the potential of technology and life skills for building their careers. We are equipping Anteaters with the skills, insights, and networks to not just participate in the future but to shape it.”
It’s also our pleasure to announce our new dedicated Hub Staff: Haley Marts (Computer Science, ’24), Laura Dobey (Business Administration, ’25), Juan Brito (Computer Science, ’26), and Tanis Sarbatananda (Computer Science, ’25). This team is excited to welcome you to the Hub. Our doors are open for you to say hello, utilize our innovative smart whiteboard, experience our treadmill desks, and advance your tech journey at UCI.
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to bridge classroom learning with practical experience, potential employment, and a community of tech-minded peers and professionals.
“The Hub Info Sessions at the ANTrepreneur Center inspire our students to become the pioneers of tomorrow. Each session is a unique opportunity to ignite curiosity, foster entrepreneurship, and chart new paths in the ever-evolving tech landscape” said Ryan Foland, Director of the ANTrepreneur Center.
Access the latest technology to experiment, learn, and grow in a brand-new space
Image credit: Theresa Phan
In an exciting development that promises to promote innovation at UCI and provide students the opportunities to prepare themselves for their future careers, the UCI Office of Data and Information Technology (ODIT) is thrilled to announce the launch of a new space at the ANTrepreneur Center called The Hub. This expansion marks a significant milestone for the program’s goal of putting cutting-edge technology in the hands of students, faculty, and staff.
The Hub provides various tools, sandboxes, and training environments for the UCI community. Thanks to this partnership with the ANTrepreneur Center, The Hub will be able to reach more students than ever before. The new space is poised to play a pivotal role in nurturing the next generation of trailblazers and innovators.
What is The Hub?
The Hub is powered by UCI ODIT and curates resources from participating organizations such as Amazon Web Services, ServiceNow, Siemens, Soul Machines, Syntropy, Salesforce, Gartner, and many more. The UCI community can leverage this suite of tools at no cost—anytime and anywhere.
“The Hub is a place where we can all discover and learn the latest tools that will bring innovation to our society,” said Vice Chancellor and Chief Digital Officer Tom Andriola. “We know students are looking ahead to graduation and what comes next in their journey. The Hub offers them the opportunity to engage with technology in a way that complements their academic goals and will help them be career- ready.”
Users have the option to access these platforms and leverage the tools for a school project, personal discovery, or an innovation challenge–such as the upcoming AI Innovation Challenge presented by the ANTrepreneur Center. Lessons learned from their experiences interacting with The Hub can later be captured as skills, micro-credentials, and/or certifications.
“We started small with a handful of partners,” added Andriola. “I am thrilled to see The Hub grow and take flight, and I can’t wait to see what heights we can reach with a physical space at the ANTrepreneur Center.”
The ANTrepreneur Center: Entrepreneurship in Action
The ANTrepreneur Center, a vibrant on-campus resource for visionary Anteaters, is the ideal partner to engage innovative students. Now backed by The Hub, the center is even better equipped to support students in bringing their startup dreams to life.
The Hub at the ANTrepreneur Center provides workspaces where students can explore the various tools and also interact with each other. The space is designed to facilitate learning, brainstorming, and interaction with other students. At The Hub, students will find dedicated desks and collaboration tools such as electronic whiteboards, stand-up desks, and even under-desk treadmills.
“Our vision is to make sure the ANTrepreneur Center is a safe place and home base where UCI undergraduate students go to start and explore their entrepreneurial journey,” said Director Ryan Foland. “The addition of The Hub at our center is a natural partnership that will help us do just that.”
Key Features of The Hub at the ANTrepreneur Center
Collaborative Workspace: The Hub’s new space at the ANTrepreneur Center provides students with a collaborative workspace where they can brainstorm, create, and collaborate on their projects.
Access to Resources: Students at The Hub will have access to a wealth of resources provided by the top names in tech.
Community Building: The Hub fosters a close-knit community of students from all majors who can learn from each other, collaborate on projects, and grow together.
What to Expect Next
Check out The Hub’s new space at the ANTrepreneur Center at the kickoff for the AI Innovation Challenge on October 16, 2023. This event promises to be a celebration of innovation and a testament to UCI’s dedication to nurturing the entrepreneurial spirit within its student body.
Get Involved
Are you a UCI student looking to explore new opportunities in tech? The Hub at the ANTrepreneur Center is here to support you on your journey. To learn more about The Hub’s resources and how to get involved, visit The Hub’s webpage.
The partnership between The Hub and the ANTrepreneur Center is the latest effort by UCI to support entrepreneurship and innovation on campus. Stay tuned for more updates as we embark on this exciting journey along with UCI’s entrepreneurship ecosystem, a group which includes Beall Applied Innovation, Career Pathways, the Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, the Division of Undergraduate Education, the Beall Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Merage School, and many others.
EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association with the goal of advancing higher education through the use of information technology (IT). To this end, EDUCAUSE has fostered one of the largest communities of higher education institutions and professionals dedicated to exploring the various ways that IT can transform the higher education landscape.
Every year, EDUCAUSE publishes a series of Horizon Reports that highlights the trends and innovations that are shaping the future of higher education across key categories.This year marks the first edition of the Data and Analytics Horizon Report focused on the latest data and analytics trends and practices that drive postsecondary institutional decision-making and strategic planning. UCI’s submission, titled “Comprehensive Analytics for Student Success (CODAS),” was chosen as an exemplar in the category of DEI for data and analytics.
About UCI CODAS
Today’s complex societal problems require a greater level of interdisciplinary collaboration to facilitate exploration and discovery. Within higher education, promoting DEI is one of the critical issues that require collective recognition and effort to address. CODAS represents UCI’s endeavor to do just that.
UCI CODAS is designed as a robust data infrastructure that brings together diverse datasets for easy access and analysis using traditional analytical techniques and more advanced techniques such as machine learning, deep learning, and federated learning.
CODAS represents a collaboration between the UCI School of Education and campus leaders, including the UCI Office of Enrollment Management, the UCI Office of Data and Information Technology, the UCI Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, the UCI Education Research Initiative, and the UCI Office of Information Technology. Working together, these campus units developed CODAS to create a unified dataset and a common analytics platform to support researchers and educators looking to improve DEI. To that end, CODAS is not simply a central hub that collects important student data—it also serves as an ecosystem that aims to develop and deploy cutting-edge measures to understand the student experience, support student success, increase diversity in higher education, and achieve more equitable outcomes for all students.
“We are building an engine for knowledge discovery that empowers UCI to better support our student population,” says Tom Andriola, Vice Chancellor for Information Technology, and Data. “CODAS promotes research and discovery that will elevate the student experience and challenge our institution to make systemic changes to promote equity and inclusion.”
CODAS creates a data operating system that collates data and makes it available to researchers and other stakeholders to address many problems within higher education. The data operating system is designed to support rich and recurring human interactions and foster collaboration between ecosystem participants. Through CODAS, stakeholders have access to data sources, artifacts, and the resources required for discovery, tool development, and implementation.
CODAS builds upon several existing UCI datasets, including the UCI School of Education’s UCI Measuring Undergraduate Success Trajectories project (UCI-MUST), data from the UCI Education Research Initiative, and information from individual faculty researchers. “Compiling data from such a diverse array of sources ensures that CODAS serves as a comprehensive and versatile foundation as we aim to foster student success,” explains Brian Sato, Director of the UCI Education Research Initiative and Associate Dean of the Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation. “Thanks to the variety and depth of information, researchers can find value in this dataset no matter what they are investigating.”
CODAS at Work: UCI COMPASS
One example of CODAS’s impact on campus is the UCI Comprehensive Analytics for Student Success (COMPASS) project. UCI COMPASS aims to disseminate relevant student data to campus advisors, faculty, and administrators with the goal of providing actionable information to improve student outcomes and success. UCI COMPASS fosters collaboration between UCI CODAS, the UCI Office of Academic Planning and Institutional Research, UCI Enrollment Management, the UCI Office of Information Technology, and the UCI Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning to offer a set of analytics tools, dashboards, services, and reports to empower student outreach and intervention.
Speaking on the importance of the collaboration, Patricia Morales, Vice Provost for UCI Enrollment Management, says:
“The Division of Enrollment Management is honored and excited to be active collaborators and partners within UCI COMPASS. Enrollment Management Analytics (EMA) provides near real-time analytics of student enrollment data to support advising, planning, and operational decisions. By combining the data and analytics strengths of our respective offices, we are able to maximize our institution’s ability to make more strategic and impactful decisions that benefit the students we serve.”
In simple terms, UCI COMPASS compiles data on student demographics, enrollment, academic performance, and other metrics and analyzes this information to generate reports. Academic/student support staff and faculty can then access these reports and take necessary action to assist students or adjust their teaching and course design.
Michael Dennin, Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning and Dean of the Division of Undergraduate Education, explains that UCI COMPASS was developed as a multi-pronged approach to promoting student success:
“Fostering diverse and inclusive learning environments is a top priority at UCI. We believe that every student should have access to equitable pathways for success, and UCI COMPASS is a critical step toward realizing this goal. By collating important information on academic performance across a variety of factors, we can step in and help individual students while also evaluating our institutional practices and policies to ensure they aren’t imposing unfair obstacles for certain student populations.”
Course equity dashboards are one subset of the UCI COMPASS project. These dashboards—developed in partnership with a research project focused on identifying and addressing grade equity gaps in STEM courses–provide data on equity gaps in UCI’s schools, departments, and courses. Within the dashboards, data can be sorted by various student characteristics, including underrepresented minority status, first-generation status, low-income status, and gender.
“The UCI COMPASS dashboards provide invaluable insight about the persistence of equity gaps both across and within departments,” says Kameryn Denaro, Research Specialist at the Divison of Teaching Excellence and Innovation and principal researcher on the project that led to the creation of the dashboards. “By leveraging this tool to identify exemplary instructors, courses, and departments, a more detailed qualitative examination can be used to identify varying policies, classroom practices, and curriculum structures (among others) that result in more equitable outcomes for all students.”
UCI COMPASS course equity dashboards are an important aspect of CODAS and UCI’s cross-campus push to improve DEI. As a designated Hispanic Serving Institution and an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution, UCI has a responsibility to ensure that all students are provided with an equal opportunity for success. The data and tools available on the dashboards highlight where that opportunity is not yet fully realized and allows for evidence-based decision-making around course grading policies, assessment techniques, and other policies and practices that affect student outcomes.
While the UCI COMPASS project represents an example of CODAS’s work on campus, CODAS has the potential to impact the entire higher education system. In fact, CODAS’s infrastructure and platform were specifically designed to be adaptable and scalable to meet the needs of any institution or educational research initiative.
“One of our goals with CODAS is for it to serve as a resource for researchers across the state and even the nation,” says Vice Provost Dennin. “CODAS is a valuable tool, and we want to share it. While promoting DEI at UCI is important, our efforts cannot stop here. If we truly want to make a difference and support all students, we need to make informed changes across the entire higher education system. And we believe that sharing the data and tools available through CODAS is a good start.”
The University of California, Irvine announced the launch of the Institute for Precision Health, an endeavor that marries UCI’s powerhouse health sciences, engineering, machine learning, artificial intelligence, clinical genomics and data science capabilities to deliver the most effective health and wellness strategy for each individual person and, in doing so, confronts the linked challenges of health equity and the high cost of care.
The institute will bring a multifaceted, integrated approach to what many call the next great advancement in healthcare. Precision medicine collects patient data – history, exams, demographics, molecular and diagnostic tests – and uses the power of computer algorithms, predictive modeling and AI to develop personalized treatment and lifelong health maintenance plans.
“What we’re doing at the Institute for Precision Health is perhaps the most important step we’ll take in this generation to improve health and well-being,” said Steve A.N. Goldstein, M.D., Ph.D., FAAP, UCI’s vice chancellor for health affairs. “The ever-evolving capabilities of the IPH herald a future of personally tailored care that fundamentally alters the healthcare landscape to place the patient at the center and in control.
“In the past, individuals were treated based on approaches thought to be best for groups of patients. Now we begin the IPH epoch of patient-centric care designed to continuously improve the health of the individual within their community, even as new knowledge accrues, whereby rights, incentives, transparency and control remain the purview of the patient,” Goldstein added.
IPH is an ecosystem for collaboration across disciplines that comprises seven areas:
SMART (statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence) develops novel statistical methodology to integrate and analyze health records, molecular data, and observational clinical outcomes. The unit is led by Daniel Gillen, professor and chair of statistics, and Zhaoxia Yu, associate professor of statistics.
A2IR (applied artificial intelligence research) designs practical solutions to real world clinical problems and cost-effective, value-based care. It is led by Peter Chang, assistant professor-in-residence of radiological sciences.
A3 (advanced analytics and artificial intelligence) brings solutions to inpatient, ambulatory and community settings and supports pilot applications. The area is led by Daniel Chow, assistant professor-in-residence of radiological sciences.
Precision omics generates, analyzes, and administers genomic, proteomic, and chemical data. It is led by Suzanne Sandmeyer, professor in biological chemistry, and Leslie Thompson, Donald Bren professor and Chancellor’s Professor in psychiatry & human behavior and neurobiology & behavior.
Collaboratory for health and wellness (powered by Syntropy) houses the dynamic analytics platforms and patient-controlled data at the core of the IPH ecosystem. The group is led by Tom Andriola, vice chancellor for information, technology and data, and Kai Zheng, professor of informatics.
Deployable health equity brings IPH into communities to create solutions to narrow the disparities gap in the health and wellbeing of vulnerable populations. The unit is led by Dan Cooper, professor of pediatrics and associate vice chancellor for clinical & translational research, and Bernadette Boden-Albala, professor and director of the Program in Public Health and founding dean of the planned School of Population & Public Health.
Education and training, with leadership from each of the above areas, brings courses, seminars, certificates and degrees in statistics, machine learning-artificial intelligence, omics, and bioinformatics to practitioners and students.
Because the disciplines included in IPH already existed at UCI, Goldstein noted, it was in many ways only a small step to join them together and build a resource across campus. The synergy created, however, is no small matter. “This is the giant leap for healthcare. It’s glaringly clear that precision health is how to increase the quality of care, to decrease the cost of care – by both improving how it’s delivered and matching cost to value – and to deliver quality healthcare to the underserved,” he said, adding that the institute’s success will be measured by improvements in individual and community health.
A major goal is revealing new approaches to tackle ailments that lack successful therapies. “For many diseases – especially neurodegenerative ones like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and even Huntington’s, where the causal gene is known – there are simply no treatments available that change their course. We’re excited because we know that with precision health, we have the potential to define diseases better, understand them better and treat them far better,” said Thompson, IPH co-director. “We expect major breakthroughs.”
While the vision idea for IPH has long been in the works, the COVID-19 pandemic was a beta test demonstrating how rapidly critical medical needs could be addressed. In early 2020, with elements of IPH in place, UCI clinicians, biomedical and computer scientists, and public health experts joined forces to create an AI-driven tool to assess the critical care needs of COVID patients. This app-based tool, the COVID Vulnerability Index, demonstrated that a data-driven approach coupled with world-class clinical therapeutics could help yield the best outcomes for individuals.
“We couldn’t have had a ‘proof of concept’ with higher stakes than the pandemic,” said Tom Andriola, IPH co-director. “We saw in real time how mobilizing our capabilities to analyze health data and make customized decisions could complement leading-edge clinical treatments to save lives and reduce hospital stays.”
“Additionally, there is an explosion of data in healthcare, and we’re still only using a small fraction in decision-making,” he added. “IPH is including not only data from traditional healthcare settings but also the data coming from a new generation of empowered health consumers who are tracking and managing their own health journey.”
The plan is for IPH to have a brick-and-mortar home on the UCI campus that will serve as a hub for educating data-informed clinicians to practice at the top of their licenses, a site for the infrastructure to facilitate translational research, a place for community outreach and a venue for commercial collaborations. Already, industry leaders such as Syntropy and MITRE and community partners such as Children’s Health of Orange County and the VA Long Beach Healthcare System are working with IPH to leverage UCI’s capabilities and commitment as a fair broker for health data, placing individuals first.
“For patients, the message is that UCI’s Institute for Precision Health is the future of your care and well-being,” Goldstein said. “For the research community, IPH is a wide-open opportunity for discoveries that matter. For the business community, IPH is ready to partner to advance new, cost-effective care. And for the philanthropic community – the folks who are determined to change the world – this is it. This is your chance.”
The University of California, Irvine is a founding member of the Advancing Clinical Trials at the Point of Care coalition. Launched today, ACT@POC will generate high-quality clinical research evidence in real time to better evaluate treatments and therapeutics, including those to treat COVID-19. Its members will engage a broader, more diverse group of patients and providers and develop digital health tools that make clinical trials simpler to run and more accessible to patients.
“Academic health centers like those in ACT@POC are uniquely suited to lead improvements in clinical trials so they are inclusive and more rapidly employed to improve patient outcomes,” said Steve A.N. Goldstein, M.D., Ph.D., FAAP, vice chancellor for health affairs. “I am proud that UCI Health Affairs – which is advancing holistic approaches to supporting wellness and providing evidence-based, patient-centered, team-based healthcare – is a founding member of this national effort to make large-scale clinical trials in front-line settings accessible and responsive to the great diversity of patients and stakeholders across the nation.”
Currently, the complexity and cost of traditional clinical trials pose obstacles to patient and provider participation, identification of effective treatments for diseases, and the acceleration of new clinical insights and knowledge. This multi-stakeholder coalition aims to drive implementation of large-scale clinical trials at the community level – in the doctor’s offices and care facilities where most of the U.S. population receives care.
Steve Zylius / UCI
“This coalition will advance data collection methods to greatly expand the number of sites and patients participating in clinical studies, especially for more diverse populations and underserved communities,” says Tom Andriola, UCI’s vice chancellor for information, technology and data and chief digital officer.
“This coalition will advance data collection methods to greatly expand the number of sites and patients participating in clinical studies, especially for more diverse populations and underserved communities,” said Tom Andriola, vice chancellor for information, technology and data and chief digital officer. “The coalition also will be able to employ advanced analytical tools and methodologies for real-world evidence that can bring timely insights not just for the research setting but all the way back to front-line clinical practice.”
UCI is home to one of the leading health centers on the West Coast conducting clinical research, and it’s a site for myriad nationwide clinical trials, most notably in the areas of cancer and neuroscience. Dr. Daniela Bota, vice dean for clinical research and head of the UCI Center for Clinical Research, reports that UCI trials have increased by more than 36 percent in each of the last two years, with over 800 currently led by 215 principal investigators, representing $100 million in obligated costs.
Founding members of ACT@POC also include the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, the MITRE Corp., the Cure Drug Repurposing Collaboratory, Duke University Health System, Emory University’s Morningside Center for Innovative and Affordable Medicine, Intermountain Healthcare, the Mayo Clinic and the Broad Institute. Its growing membership will encompass health systems, community-based care organizations, health research organizations and other collaborators.
“The vast majority of patients and their providers do not participate in clinical trials,” said Dr. Mark McClellan, director of the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy. “Through its more accessible, cost-effective and inclusive approach, the Advancing Clinical Trials at the Point of Care coalition will help the clinical trial enterprise answer priority research questions on COVID-19; prepare for future public health emergencies; and address common diseases where there is long-standing unmet medical need, including cardiovascular and neurological diseases.”
The consequences of inefficient, low-value, COVID-19-related clinical research made the need for a coalition to support inclusive and efficient clinical trials apparent. One analysis found that of 2,610 trials of existing drugs repurposed as COVID-19 therapeutics, only 5 percent had sufficient enrollment and key design features to yield actionable evidence. Further, only a tiny fraction of Americans diagnosed with COVID-19 participated in those trials.
“COVID-19 has required health systems and public health experts to rely on data for decision-making to quickly gain insights that could deliver better patient outcomes,” said Dr. Brian Anderson, chief digital health physician at MITRE. “The answers to many research questions can be found in the data and allow for engagement of patients in underserved communities, who are often left out of traditional clinical research trials. By working with clinicians who are the trusted caregivers of underserved communities, we hope to more fully engage and reach people through this collaboration to help yield new answers to many public health diseases.”
The coalition’s agenda and action steps aim to substantially augment the evidence generation capacity of the current clinical trial enterprise by working with patient groups, community hospitals and health centers, medical practices, research organizations, and biotechnology companies. The coalition’s goals include:
Engaging clinicians in a broader range of care settings
Developing and adopting effective data collection tools
Collaborating with clinical trial design leaders, regulators, funders and other stakeholders to ensure that clinical trial design features are fit for purpose
Enrolling diverse trial participants in effective, community-level trials
Addressing unmet medical needs by reaching a critical mass of participation in existing and new clinical trials
Improving technological support for such studies over time
