Leveraging structured EMR data for efficient patient prescreening: a practical approach to reducing screen-failure rates in Light Touch Trial

Screening for clinical trials represents a significant challenge in ophthalmic research due to inefficiencies and costs related to manual review of medical records and ocular imaging [1][2][3][4].Screen failures rates are also high.This constraint is particularly acute in competitive therapeutic areas like neovascular agerelated macular degeneration (nAMD), where the identification of eligible patients from a large population of patients undergoing treatment requires meticulous extraction of a highly specific patient subgroup [5][6][7].Although manual prescreening is a common practice, the implementation of systematic, automated prescreening using electronic medical record (EMR) data is an emerging and underutilized methodology in ophthalmology trials [8].Penberthy et al. estimated screening