IgniteData and RealTime Partner to Streamline Clinical Data Transfer From eSource to Sponsor Systems

IgniteData and RealTime eClinical Solutions have announced a partnership that will allow research sites using RealTime's electronic source data (eSource) solution to transfer clinical data directly to a sponsor's electronic data capture (EDC) system or other data destination of choice through IgniteData's Archer platform.¹

The collaboration is designed to reduce the manual transcription burden on site staff and shorten the time sponsors spend on data acquisition and monitoring.

RealTime supports more than 3,000 sites across more than 30 countries, with its Site Operations Management System (SOMS) used by nine of the ten largest site networks, three of the top five contract research organizations (CROs), and three major hospitals.

IgniteData's Archer platform is currently engaged at 80% of the National Cancer Institute's Designated Cancer Centers, including 19 of the top 30 cancer centers in the US, and spans a site network across four continents, six countries, and 11 international institutions.

For sites, the practical impact is straightforward: data captured once in RealTime's eSource platform flows automatically to the sponsor's system, removing the need for manual re-entry into each sponsor's EDC. That step, which research coordinators currently perform repeatedly across studies, is one of the more time-consuming administrative tasks at the site level.

"Our sites capture data once, electronically, at the source," said Jeff Kozloff, chief executive officer of RealTime eClinical Solutions. "They shouldn't have to re-enter it into every sponsor's EDC. With Archer, data flows from RealTime eSource directly to the sponsor's system of choice, so coordinators spend less time on transcription and queries and more time with patients."

For sponsors, the partnership is intended to reduce development timelines and free budget for higher-value trial activities. On the site side, eliminating manual data re-entry allows staff to redirect time toward patient-facing work.

"Archer is playing a unique role in reducing the burden that executing laborious and cumbersome clinical data transfer processes can have on sites and helping to accelerate the pace by which promising discoveries can become new treatments," said Laura Hilty, chief strategy officer of IgniteData.

The broader eSource challenge

The partnership sits within a broader industry effort to unlock the full value of eSource across clinical development. In December 2025, Applied Clinical Trials published a research article co-authored by a team including Joe Lengfellner, chief product officer at IgniteData and former senior director of clinical research informatics at Memorial Sloan Kettering, examining the barriers to scaling eSource beyond structured data domains.²

The paper found that while electronic health record-to-EDC workflows have become the most widely implemented eSource pathway, more than 80% of healthcare data remains unstructured, locked in free-text clinical notes, pathology reports, radiology findings, and imaging files.

In oncology and rare disease trials, between 45% and 70% of trial-relevant variables exist only in unstructured formats. Until those sources are integrated, eSource adoption risks plateauing at partial coverage.

The research identified a set of near-term use cases where artificial intelligence and natural language processing can add immediate value: medication data, safety monitoring from clinical notes, and imaging endpoints. Longer term, the authors described a vision of federated, continuous validation models where algorithms are maintained centrally but deployed locally across sites of varying digital maturity, enabling smaller hospitals to participate in advanced eSource workflows without building their own informatics infrastructure from scratch.

The IgniteData and RealTime partnership addresses the structured data transfer layer that the research describes as foundational—removing the transcription bottleneck that currently limits how quickly and reliably data moves from site to sponsor, before the more complex challenge of activating unstructured data can be fully addressed.

References

1. IgniteData and RealTime Announce Partnership to Expand Clinical Trial Data Transfer Capabilities Across Clinical Research Organizations in the U.S. and Key Global Markets. Press release. IgniteData and RealTime eClinical Solutions. October 13, 2026. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261013274056/en/IgniteData-and-RealTime-Announce-Partnership-to-Expand-Clinical-Trial-Data-Transfer-Capabilities-Across-Clinical-Research-Organizations-in-the-U.S.-and-Key-Global-Markets
2. Unlocking Unstructured Health Data: Scaling eSource-Enabled Clinical Trials. Applied Clinical Trials. Mats Sundgren et al. December 18, 2025. https://www.appliedclinicaltrialsonline.com/view/unlocking-unstructured-health-data-scaling-esource-enabled-clinical-trials