Clinical research facility cuts core workflow time

AOVO, a private nephrology research facility on the Gold Coast, has reduced the time of core clinical trial workflows from 30–45 minutes to under five using Opti Assist, while a single morning’s billing review has also surfaced tens of thousands of dollars in unclaimed items.

AOVO works with commercial sponsors and investigators across multiple trials at once, including Phase 1–3 multicentre programs. Every decision made on the floor has to be traceable back to a source document.

Each trial arrives with its own protocol, lab manual and pharmacy manual, each running to hundreds of pages. When someone needs a specific answer, it is in there somewhere. Finding it means searching, cross-referencing, and often waiting on a reply before anyone can act.

The same constraint applied everywhere. Patient questions during a visit meant searching documents in real time. Evaluating a new trial opportunity took long enough that it strained resources and put a barrier in front of work the team wanted to take on.

Throughout, the compliance requirement was non-negotiable. AOVO operates under GCP, TGA, Privacy Act and ICH standards. Every answer needs a source and every decision needs a trail, and maintaining that manually across a growing portfolio was becoming unsustainable.

When AOVO first saw ORCA Opti in 2025, Operations Manager Yupin Robson recognised that it could solve the site’s search problem. After a period of planning and demonstrations, the site began a three-month trial in mid-2026, starting with the core problem of getting accurate, auditable answers quickly.

Three active studies were loaded into Opti Assist, including the protocol, lab manual and pharmacy manual for each. The whole team — including coordinators, pharmacists, lab staff and the investigator — could query those documents in plain language and get answers drawn from the source, with the exact passage shown alongside the response.

Outcomes of the trial included the following:

• Answering a patient question during a visit was reduced from approximately 30 minutes to approximately two minutes.
• Working through a procedural scenario was reduced from approximately 45 minutes to approximately two minutes.
• Evaluating a new trial opportunity was reduced from approximately 60 minutes to approximately five minutes.
   

"That time saving is … not just an hour,” Robson said. “You’re talking about very precious real estate in everyone’s day. And if it saves me five minutes, what that five minutes possibly could mean is a week’s worth of decision that gets made in that five minutes.”

The audit trail built itself. Every query, answer and source reference logged automatically, meeting GCP documentation requirements that had previously taken manual effort. AOVO converted from trial to a paying customer.

“I feel like we’ve fixed the information for the coordinator,” Robson said. “That’s nailed.”

A second benefit of the system concerned clinical trial billing, which is surprisingly intricate. Every trial carries its own contract and its own terms, and reconciling what has been delivered against what has been claimed is slow, manual work.

Robson loaded a trial’s invoicing material into a Knowledge Pack and asked ORCA to reconcile it: what had been billed, what was outstanding, what was missing. The review took a morning, and surfaced tens of thousands of dollars in unclaimed and mis-recorded items on that trial alone.

The clearest example came from an assumption that held on every other study the site runs but not on this one. ORCA caught the discrepancy, and it came to $6500 in reimbursements that had never been claimed. The invoice went in immediately and is now in the system for payment.

The review also surfaced items that had been recorded incorrectly and were quietly blocking claims. Once identified, they were straightforward to fix.

“Me using ORCA to audit in the finance world has just saved so much time and actually so much confusion,” Robson said.

AOVO and ORCA are now moving from information retrieval towards automating more of the operational spine of the clinic and mapping that work to the site’s compliance obligations. The work thus becomes more consistent and less time-consuming across every study — and because it is mapped to those obligations as it happens, the work itself becomes the evidence that it was done properly.

In development are the following:

• Screening support, using existing clinical correspondence to surface potential trial participants who might otherwise be missed.
• Milestone and payment tracking, reducing the manual overhead in the invoicing cycle.
• Compliance cross-referencing, so that TGA, ICH, GCP and Privacy Act requirements sit alongside protocol answers rather than in a separate workstream.
• A glomerulonephritis patient registry, with risk stratification, a clinician review interface and an append-only audit trail.
   

“If you actually pack the problem up, what is the actual problem that you’re solving?” Robson said. “You’re solving the ability to wade through big data very quickly. So the use case is all these different examples, but the problem you're solving is actually getting through the data.”

Kat Giudes, founder and Managing Director of ORCA Opti, concluded, “AOVO is the whole idea in one place: connect the documents, get answers in seconds with the source attached, and the audit trail writes itself. No migration, no IT project, just precious clinical time handed back to the team.”

Image credit: iStock.com/Sean Anthony Eddy