By Deborah Borfitz 

October 22, 2026 | Advocate Health, one of the largest health systems in the U.S., is extending its “care for all” mission to clinical research with the building of an organization-wide National Center for Clinical Trials (NCCT) focused on supporting and accelerating industry-funded studies. The initiative launched last November and encompasses 69 hospitals and over 1,000 care sites across eight states, collectively serving nearly 6 million patients, according to NCCT President Adam Samson. 

The move came in the aftermath of the December 2022 formal combination of Atrium Health and Advocate Aurora Health that created Advocate Health—a deal that also brought into the fold the Wake Forest University School of Medicine—when the executive team recognized the need for clinical trials to be an enterprise capability rather than “a series of strong but disparate research programs spread across the footprint,” he says. The idea was to create a robust, centralized infrastructure embodying industry expertise in running multi-site clinical trials and providing shared services to frontline clinical teams to reduce the massive administrative burdens that are a standard part of conducting them. 

The scale of the effort and investment behind the NCCT is unique among U.S. health systems, says Samson, noting that the “local” institutional review board (IRB) of Advocate Health also operates on a schedule that’s more consistent with a commercial IRB like WCG and Advarra. Its members meet multiple times a week to keep up with the thousands of ongoing trials at any given time. 

Samson, who has previously grown and operated clinical research programs at organizations including Walgreens and Duke Clinical Research Institute, was hired to lead the charge. Supporting him are five leaders whose experience spans the clinical research ecosystem. 

One particularly unique aspect of the NCCT is that it includes a business development and sales function specific to clinical trials, a necessity given the magnitude of the operational hub, says Samson. In addition to a single IRB and clinical trial management system, the core infrastructure also integrates patient matching tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and centralized data tracking to embed research into everyday provider workflows.   

“Historically, industry-funded trials kind of fell into our lap, like they often do for investigators,” he says, a result of outreach by pharma companies. “We now have the ability ... to take each new trial opportunity that comes in and offer the sponsor multiple potential investigators that we have across our enterprise.” The NCCT can also home in on key customers to ensure visibility into their upcoming trials.  

Automating Technologies  

The 4-year-old combined system operates through the three primary regional brand names (Atrium Health, Advocate Health Care, and Aurora Health Care) under the umbrella of Advocate Health, says Samson. Each of these entities has been doing clinical trials for decades. 

About 30% of the care sites composing Advocate Health are in rural communities, he adds. NCCT became the means to stay true to Advocate’s mission by ensuring all patients, no matter where they live, had the opportunity to consider a novel therapy through a clinical trial as part of their normal care pathway.  

This happens largely by helping investigators with all the associated administrative work such as contracting and budgets, IRB submissions, and regulatory document collection and maintenance, says Samson. “Technology is core to a lot of what we’re trying to do,” which has long been anchored by the Epic electronic health record (EHR) system.  

Increasingly, the focus has been on converting people from emails and spreadsheets to best-in-class technologies, making the workflow smoother, he adds. Clinical trial technology sits within the remit of the NCCT, which is generating real-world data and evidence for sponsors as it relates to either feasibility and patient matching for phase 1 to 3 clinical trials or their post-marketing commitments.  

Advocate Health’s large footprint covers every race and ethnicity and finding those representative populations is part of the NCCT’s proprietary site selection process, which also layers in other factors such as urbanity and social determinants of health, says Samson. “We are finding that sponsors very much appreciate having that [extra information] as part of the decision-making process ... [regarding] where best to place their studies.”  

This gets back to the expertise of biostatisticians, informaticists, and epidemiologists sitting within Wake Forest University School of Medicine that is helping the NCCT design systems to better ask questions and surface that type of information, he says. “[It] has super-charged our team’s ability to build the right solutions that get us to those answers faster.” 

Reducing the operational complexity of trials could make U.S.-based sites more viable for sponsors and thereby help stem the movement of trials to overseas markets, says Samson. “The more we can strengthen the U.S. sites, the better we are able to continue offering these [study] opportunities to our patients.” 

But access does not necessarily mean patients are going to quickly consent, he says, in highlighting NCCT’s community engagement efforts. “Any time we step into a new community, we are doing a lot of prep work aligning with existing efforts of Advocate Health around community education for care and bringing clinical trials into the conversation. ... The onus is on us and other health systems and really the whole research community to do as much as we can to educate in advance of a patient ever being approached for an individual clinical trial.” 

Onboarding Strategy 

Buildout of the centralized shared service is enabled by the integration of NCCT’s work into the many research programs across the overall Advocate Health system, Samson says. But it’s a flexible strategy that allows for customized support for the unique needs of different research teams. 

The enterprise has close to 1,000 experienced investigators as it is, many of those doing federally funded work as well as industry-funded trials, he reports. Their study workload will expand over time, as will the investigator pool itself as the NCCT invests in strengthening its clinical trial capacity across more rural areas, most immediately within Wisconsin and Georgia. 

Currently, NCCT is acting as the single contracting entity for all industry-funded trials across Advocate Health, giving sponsors “a single front door to come into,” says Samson. That provides opportunities to introduce companies to investigators they may not know as well as keep rates consistent.    

NCCT will be onboarding research programs into receiving its full suite of shared services over the next year, he continues, so that every industry-funded trial across Advocate Health is fully covered.  

Although a lot of energy is being put into providing support to existing investigators and integrating NCCT services into their programs, physicians newly interested in getting involved in trials are also being connected to the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at Wake Forest University School of Medicine for foundational clinical research training, says Samson. In terms of therapeutic focus, the priorities are Advocate Health’s national service lines for oncology, heart and vascular, and neuroscience where the health system wants sufficient capacity to support the pipelines of sponsors. Public announcements, some co-branded with top life science companies, are expected to be released soon.  

“Almost half of all drugs approved every year are cancer drugs, and this is certainly an area where we want to make significant contributions,” he says. “But there are a number of other areas where we have great potential,” including pediatrics and infectious disease. “Name a TA [therapeutic area] and we’re probably doing some sort of clinical research study in it.” 

The EHR system of Advocate Health acts as the primary feed for a data lake providing massive benefits to clinical trial sponsors, he notes, on top of all the informatics resources available within the school of medicine to query study eligibility criteria against that database. “We can get precise around where patients are because we have patients’ full health record. We can go a lot deeper in determining whether a patient will likely qualify.”  

That also helps NCCT identify with much higher fidelity where patients are located and their care site. Once those sites are activated, Samson says, it helps the central team offer local researchers insights into which of their patients to approach with study opportunities in lieu of doing tedious manual chart reviews.  

Being a large integrated delivery network, Advocate Health already has robust quality compliance and regulatory functions, he points out. On top of that, NCCT is “building out a distinct function that will use risk-based quality management ... leveraging techniques like centralized statistical monitoring [to] proactively take charge of our own quality and the safety of clinical trial participants.” 

Several AI tools designed to make frontline clinicians and teams as well as the NCCT central team work more efficiently are also currently being piloted, reports Samson.  

Tracking Progress 

Advocate Health is on track to exceed its goal of opening 20% more new clinical trials in 2026 than in 2025, says Samson. NCCT has similar goals around decreasing the overall trial startup cycle time, which involves critical path items such as clinical trial agreements and feasibility assessments, he adds.  

Internally, the NCCT’s core metrics revolve around its ambitions to integrate its services into Advocate Health’s many research programs over the next year and show that the efficiencies have resulted in a higher volume of clinical trials being conducted. Next year, the NCCT will be reporting publicly on its first full year of learning and start demonstrating some of those proof points to industry sponsors.  

Many other health systems are likewise looking to expand their trial programs, which Samson says he is pleased to see as there is “plenty of work for all of us to do and at the end of the day we do it for the patients. Clinical trials in general continue to take longer to enroll than anyone anticipates or wants and continue to not include patient populations who we all want to be included.” 

Samson and his NCCT team were at SCOPE 2026 networking and showcasing their newly launched infrastructure and connecting with life science and biotech sponsors to discuss expanding clinical trial access and predictive enrollment operations across Advocate Health's massive network. They’ll be returning to present at SCOPE 2027 March 1-4 in Orlando, Florida on connecting care, research, and real-world data in a learning health system.