Eastpark Medical Center is a future ambulatory care center that will be part of UW Health’s East Campus, along with the existing East Madison Hospital facility. Eastpark is being designed to deliver true patient-centered, coordinated care, where patients can engage with multiple specialists and services in a single visit.  Part of Eastpark’s vision includes providing access to cutting-edge research therapies as part of their clinical care in a seamless, integrated experience. The mission of the Eastpark clinical research planning team is to build clinical trials center optimized by data-driven processes.

A significant portion of oncology care and clinical research will move to Eastpark when it opens, which requires the planning team to determine what clinical research resources will need to be allocated to support Eastpark operations. This project involved analyzing data from the past 5 years to predict research volume at Eastpark and providing the planning team with a predictive modeling tool to use in the future.

Overall volume of UW Health cancer-related clinic visits was found to be the best driver for most research visit volume. In fact, these volumes are highly correlated to the point of statistical significance, and having a good forecast for UW Health visits should provide a strong prediction of research volume. New cancer cases is a better predictor of research visits for some specific cancers. With a regression analysis, I was able to create volume prediction tool for the planning team.