Mass General Brigham announces AI company and clinical trial screening tool
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AIwithCare features a software platform that uses generative AI to screen patients for clinical trial eligibility.
Artificial Intelligence By Susan Morse , Executive Editor | December 16, 2025 | 11:01 AM Photo: Courtesy Mass General Brigham Mass General Brigham has announced the development of an AI company and screening tool that has sped up the process for determining a patient’s eligibility and enrollment for clinical trials.AIwithCare is a spinout of Mass General Brigham founded by researchers from the health system. AIwithCare’s AI tool RECTIFIER, which stands for RAG-Enabled Clinical Trial Infrastructure for Inclusion Exclusion Review, determines eligibility of patients for clinical trials. It was first developed by researchers at Mass General Brigham’s academic research group, Accelerator for Clinical Transformation. RECTIFIER leverages generative AI to screen a patient’s electronic health record for information that can determine eligibility for a clinical trial such as diagnoses, key health indicators and current or past medications. The tool also assesses unstructured data available in notes and reports. These are often crucial for determining trial eligibility but are typically inaccessible without a time-consuming manual review process.It also saves on the cost of determining eligibility and enrollment for clinical trials.“Rapid, accurate and cost-effective medical analytics can change the way medical data can be used for patients, providers and health systems,” Mass General Brigham said.WHY THIS MATTERSRECTIFIER has resulted in more than 20 active and onboarding use cases in research and clinical operations, including in cardiology, oncology, gastroenterology, neurology, pathology and psychiatry.Its use continues to expand across the health system and will be expanded to other providers, Mass General Brigham said. Researchers plan to scale this capability to other healthcare systems, hospitals and clinics seeking to match their patient populations with relevant clinical trialsMass General Brigham is also using RECTIFIER to accelerate patient identification and reduce the burden of manual chart review in clinical and population health use cases.RECTIFIER is being used by pediatric gastroenterologists to perform patient referral triage, demonstrating 94.7% accuracy. In identifying urgent labs and symptoms buried within clinical notes, it has shown a 98% accuracy.
The Mass General Brigham Population Health Service Organization is using RECTIFIER to streamline patient eligibility for a heart failure management program. Other groups are using RECTIFIER to perform high-resolution phenotyping of patients with sickle cell disease or across ALS trials to accelerate patient identification for life-altering therapeutics.THE LARGER TRENDRECTIFIER is the first AI tool by Mass General Brigham involving a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) AI application developed by researchers within the health system.A 2024 NEJM AI study found, RECTIFIER more accurately identified eligible patients for a clinical trial compared to manual screening, and at less cost than traditional methods. A follow-up randomized trial of nearly 4,500 patients, published in JAMA this year, found that the rate of eligibility and enrollment was almost double that of traditional manual screening. There were no significant differences in trial eligibility and enrollment rates in separate analyses factoring in patients’ race, gender and ethnicity, the study said.Mass General Brigham Innovation facilitated the new company spinout.The innovation arm works with researchers to manage tech transfer commercialization and coordinate industrial relationships such as licensing agreements, formation of new companies and other contracts, in addition to intellectual property (IP) management and general advising.In the past year, Mass General Brigham Innovation had more than 1,400 active licenses, more than 600 new inventions disclosed and nearly 200 issued U.S. patents.ON THE RECORD“Advancing AI that can streamline matching patients with clinical trials reflects our commitment to practical innovation that strengthens patient care and expands access to promising therapies,” said Chris Coburn, Chief Innovation Officer at Mass General Brigham. “Deploying such technology more broadly could help reduce significant barriers in care delivery and ultimately accelerate clinical research.”Email the writer: [email protected] Topic: Artificial Intelligence, Business Intelligence, Strategic Planning