Accrual Insights: An R Shiny Application for Optimizing Clinical Trial Tracking and Monitoring in Cancer Centers (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED Accurate reporting of clinical trial data is essential for advancing cancer research. Insufficient recruitment often leads to unsuccessful trials. Many institutions have implemented analytical strategies to mitigate the low accrual rates in clinical trials for cancer. The objective of this paper is to explain the process of creating a dashboard and how researchers can visualize trends and key details in the data using the dashboard. The University of Kansas Cancer Center (KUCC) has developed an interactive dashboard to process and disseminate near-real-time data on the tracking and monitoring of clinical trial accruals. Sequential analysis of enrollment data and visualizing past trends could lead to more effective proactive planning and strategies to improve enrollment. The SQL queries behind the dashboard run every morning and identify any data-related discrepancies, which are then reported to the Clinical Trials Office for manual corrections, thereby increasing the validity of the data. This dashboard, a living tool with continuous updates, is an attempt to increase accrual rates and thereby enhance opportunities to manage and complete trials successfully. We linked the data in an Oracle database to a dashboard that displays accrual data categorized by demographic and diversity matrices in tabular, summarized, and graphical formats, providing near-real-time insights for research teams to track progress and make timely, data-driven decisions. The KUCC Accrual dashboard is open only to members of research teams at KUCC. Between May 2022 and May 2025, the KUCC Accrual dashboard logged 1,163 unique sessions, a promising performance. While the KUCC accrual dashboard has potential for improvement, it currently generates feedback of near-real-time accruals, historical trends, and accrual forecasts while supporting data enhancement.