AOVO adopts Orca Opti to speed trial document work

AOVO has adopted Orca Opti Assist to speed document-heavy clinical trial work at its Gold Coast nephrology research facility. The system cut some core workflows from up to 45 minutes to under five, according to the company.

The move follows a three-month trial in which AOVO loaded documents from three active studies into the software, including protocols, lab manuals and pharmacy manuals. Staff across the site, including coordinators, pharmacists, lab staff and the investigator, then queried those materials in plain language and received answers linked to the exact source passage.

AOVO, formerly South Coast Renal, runs private nephrology research programmes for commercial sponsors and investigators across multiple studies, including Phase 1 to 3 multi-centre work. In that setting, operational decisions must be traceable to source documents. The site also works under Good Clinical Practise, Therapeutic Goods Administration, Privacy Act and International Council for Harmonisation standards.

Those requirements had created a growing administrative burden, as each trial arrived with separate manuals and protocols that could run to hundreds of pages. Finding a specific answer often meant searching multiple documents, cross-referencing sections and waiting for confirmation before staff could proceed.

The trial results pointed to substantial time savings in routine work. A patient question during a visit that previously took about 30 minutes to resolve fell to around two minutes. A procedural scenario dropped from about 45 minutes to roughly two minutes, and an assessment of a new trial opportunity fell from about 60 minutes to about five.

For a research site handling several studies at once, that reduction matters because teams often need to answer protocol questions in real time during visits. It also affects whether a site can assess and take on new studies without stretching already limited staff resources.

"That time saving is a really difficult one to answer, because it's not just an hour. You're talking about very precious real estate in everyone's day. And if it saves me 5 minutes, what that 5 minutes possibly could mean is a week's worth of decision that gets made in that 5 minutes," said Yupin Robson, operations manager at AOVO.

Robson said the audit trail was generated automatically, with each query, answer and source reference logged as part of the process. That addressed documentation demands that had previously required manual effort.

"I feel like we've fixed the information for the coordinator. That's nailed," said Robson.

After the initial trial, AOVO became a paying customer. The next use case emerged in billing, where study contracts can vary significantly and matching services delivered to claims submitted is often handled manually.

Billing review

Robson loaded invoicing material from one trial into a knowledge pack and used the software to reconcile billed items against outstanding and missing claims. The review took a morning and identified tens of thousands of dollars in unclaimed and mis-recorded items on that study, according to the company.

One discrepancy alone involved reimbursements worth AUD $6,500 that had not been claimed because staff had relied on an assumption that applied to other studies but not to this contract. Robson said the invoice was submitted immediately and entered for payment.

Other issues involved items recorded incorrectly, which had been preventing claims from being made. Once identified, those errors were simple to correct, she said.

"Me using ORCA to audit in the finance world has just saved so much time and actually so much confusion," said Robson.

Wider role

The companies are now using the system beyond document search and billing reconciliation. Work under development includes support for screening potential trial participants from existing clinical correspondence, tracking study milestones and payments, and cross-referencing compliance obligations alongside protocol answers.

They are also developing a glomerulonephritis patient registry with risk stratification, a clinician review interface and an append-only audit trail. In nephrology research, identifying and retaining patients with low-prevalence conditions can be difficult because relevant cases are dispersed across a fragmented clinical landscape.

Robson said the broader value lay in handling large volumes of information quickly rather than in any single task.

"If you actually pack the problem up, what is the actual problem that you're solving? You're solving the ability to wade through big data very quickly. So the use case is all these different examples, but the problem you're solving is actually getting through the data," said Robson.

Orca Opti is based in Brisbane and says its software is used by regulated Australian organisations. The AOVO deployment shows how clinical research sites are seeking to cut manual review work while maintaining the documentary trail needed for compliance, the company said.

"AOVO is the whole idea in one place: connect the documents, get answers in seconds with the source attached, and the audit trail writes itself. No migration, no IT project, just precious clinical time handed back to the team," said Kat Giudes, founder and managing director of Orca Opti.