Startup Idea: Automated Creation of Patient Recruitment Letters for Clinical Trials

Startup idea to develop a software that automates the creation of patient recruitment letters for clinical trials. The software would extract information from a spreadsheet, populate it into a letter template, and generate mailers en mass, saving researchers time and money.

I work as a research aide for an institution conducting clinical trials for various research purposes.The most painful problem I faced that could be solved with software was the creation of recruitment letters that would be sent out to patients en mass. These patient mailers would cost tedious, expensive hours to create, where research aides would generate the mailers by hand by copying and pasting the patient name, physician name, and enrollment code number into a text document from a massive excel file. These mailers took hours to produce a hundred, when scales on the order of thousands were needed. All that is needed is a simple copy and paste program to take the names from the master spreadsheet, impute it into the template, and generate the documents. Software would solve this problem by allowing the automation of this process to free up research aide hands to work on other projects. The software would ideally take a set list of criteria out of a master list, impute it into individual copies of a template, and generate the individual mailers. Creation of this program would save countless hours of research aide time and money. I would personally pay $100 per copy for this product. Over a team of 5 aides, that comes to a total of $500. Yes, I produced a crude program using regular expressions and R to generate mailers. Though the process was still unrefined and painful. An ideal program would be able to merge documents for ease of printing, adjust the text template from within the interface, reverse the ordering of names, adjust capitalization, etc.