nCartes' Power and Value Highlighted at the SWOG Fall Group Meeting

Fremont, California, October 7, 2025

Automating data capture by leveraging electronic health records (EHR) can significantly improve data quality and reduce the time and cost of data fulfillment in clinical trials. This has certainly been the case for a growing number of SWOG Cancer Research Network sites as was recently highlighted at the 2025 SWOG Fall Group Meeting.

SWOG is a major part of the cancer research infrastructure in the United States and the world. SWOG has members in 45 states and eight other countries as part of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) National Clinical Trials Network, or NCTN.

SWOG collaborates with nCartes to help SWOG research sites reduce the time and cost of SWOG study data fulfilment and improve data quality. With nCartes, based on peer reviewed studies and site testimonials, some participating SWOG sites have reduced data capture time on some studies by an estimated 50% (Garza et al., 2024) while vastly improving the quality of data submitted, including 100% accuracy on numeric source data (Garza et al., 2024; Goodman et al., 2025)

nCartes' power and value were highlighted at the recent SWOG Fall Group Meeting in Chicago by Michael LeBlanc, PhD, SWOG's Group Statistician and Director of the SWOG Statistics and Data Management Center, which is co-located at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and Cancer Research And Biostatistics. Addressing attendees at the SWOG NCI Community Oncology Research Program (NCORP) Research Base Clinical Trial Workshop, Dr. LeBlanc summarized the results of the two SWOG-related peer reviewed articles referenced above. Both the Garza and Goodman studies showed significant time and cost savings for sites in study data completion and very material data quality improvements including zero errors on numeric source data.

Dr. LeBlanc went on to share the experiences of SWOG-nCartes users as the users themselves had shared at an nCartes User Experience Webinar. Comments from SWOG sites and end users included:

  • "Since we've been using nCartes, oh my gosh, data entry is so much easier."
  • "We did not find any errors…a great improvement in the quality of the data with nCartes."
  • "Based on feedback from staff, there was an estimated 50%-time savings in data entry."
  • "I wish we had nCartes for all our trials."

The distinctive power of nCartes stems in part from the intelligent automation built into nCartes. In addition to eliminating manual data entry, nCartes:

  • Automates unit conversions
  • Makes decimal place corrections
  • Automates field value calculations
  • Converts numeric source data to binary values where necessary
  • Assembles similarly named labs for easy and accurate data capture
  • Eliminates similarly named lab results not applicable to the study

Contact us to learn more about nCartes.

References:

  • Garza, M. Y, Spencer, C., Hamidi, M., et al. (2024). Comparing the accuracy of traditional vs. FHIR®-based extraction of electronic health record data for two clinical trials. Stud Health Technol Inform, 316, 1368-1372. https://doi.org/10.3233/SHTI240666
  • Goodman, K., Cook, C., Weatherbee, D., et al. (2025). Automating data entry from electronic health record to electronic data capture using a trusted cloud-based application in multisite cancer clinical trials. JSCDM, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.47912/jscdm.371