Cleveland Clinic Deploys AI to Transform Clinical Trial Recruitment

Cleveland Clinic has launched a system-wide rollout of Dyania Health‘s Synapsis AI platform following a series of successful pilot programs in cardiology, oncology, and neurology. The deployment signals a growing commitment to integrating medically trained large language models (LLMs) into clinical research workflows to accelerate trial recruitment and improve patient access to experimental therapies.

Clinical trial enrollment remains one of healthcare’s most persistent inefficiencies, with more than 80% of trials failing to meet recruitment goals on schedule. By integrating Synapsis AI with its electronic health record systems, Cleveland Clinic aims to reduce administrative burdens, expand patient representation, and boost operational efficiency across research initiatives.

From Manual Bottlenecks to AI-Driven Scale

At the core of the collaboration is Synapsis, a platform designed to extract and interpret data from unstructured and structured patient records, including clinical notes, imaging, pathology reports, and lab values. Trained on medical datasets, Synapsis enables precision-matched patient identification based on trial-specific eligibility criteria.

During the pilot phase, Synapsis demonstrated significant gains in both speed and accuracy. In an oncology trial for melanoma, Synapsis identified an appropriate patient in 2.5 minutes with 96% accuracy. This compared to nearly 8 hours of review time by a specialized nurse achieving 95% accuracy, and over 9 hours with 88% accuracy by a general research nurse. The findings were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting.

In cardiology, Synapsis was used to support recruitment for the DepleTTR-CM trial in transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy. The AI system reviewed 1,476 records in one week and identified 30 eligible patients, more than double the number located by traditional methods over three months. Crucially, Synapsis also explained inclusion or exclusion decisions, supporting trial coordinator trust and compliance.

Expanding Equity and Efficiency in Research

Beyond raw speed, the Synapsis deployment offers structural advantages. By enabling recruitment across Cleveland Clinic’s broader network, instead of limiting trial participation to tertiary campuses, the platform increases geographic and demographic representation in studies. This supports both clinical relevance and health equity.

According to Dr. Lara Jehi, Chief Research Information Officer at Cleveland Clinic, “The future of medicine depends on building research systems that are precise, efficient, fair, and deeply connected to patient care. Through our work with Dyania Health, we are creating an AI-driven foundation to deliver on that promise.”

The collaboration extends to neurology, where the two organizations are validating Synapsis for movement disorders and complex neurodegenerative conditions. By benchmarking the AI’s accuracy using annotated, de-identified records, Cleveland Clinic aims to deploy the technology in more nuanced and heterogeneous clinical scenarios.

From Infrastructure to Innovation

Dyania Health’s Synapsis platform integrates directly with health system IT and operates as a workflow engine as well as an analytics layer. Unlike many generalist AI tools, Synapsis was designed for healthcare specificity, drawing clinically relevant conclusions from complex patient data while providing transparent justifications.

“Academic medical centers like Cleveland Clinic are home to some of the world’s most advanced clinical research,” said Eirini Schlosser, CEO of Dyania Health. “Yet they often face time-intensive, fragmented processes that delay recruitment and hinder equity. Synapsis changes that equation. It helps ensure innovation reaches patients when it matters most.”

The partnership also includes a financial investment by Cleveland Clinic in Dyania Health, aligning incentives and solidifying the institution’s belief in the platform’s long-term utility.

For health system CIOs, research leaders, and clinical operations executives, Cleveland Clinic’s full-scale deployment of Synapsis signals a new benchmark in research informatics: one where speed, precision, and representation are no longer tradeoffs, but simultaneously achievable through applied AI.