Case Studies
Finding the answers, and the money, hidden in the documents
South Coast Renal (now AOVO Clinical Trials) used ORCA Opti Assist to cut clinical-trial document workflows from 45 minutes to under 5, and surface unclaimed trial revenue.
- Organisation
- South Coast Renal clinical trials, now known as AOVO Clinical Trials
- Location
- Southport, Gold Coast, Queensland
- Specialty
- Clinical research, nephrology, including Phase 1 to 3 multi-centre studies
- Contact
- Yupin Robson MSc MBA, Operations Manager
- Solution
- ORCA Opti Assist
- Timeline
- First saw the platform in 2025, three-month trial through mid-2026, now a paying customer
- Outcome
- Core workflows reduced from 30 to 45 minutes to under 5. A single morning's billing review surfaced tens of thousands of dollars in unclaimed items
Time to work through a procedural scenario
Surfaced in a single morning's billing review
Built automatically from every query and source
The challenge
Running a private clinical research facility means managing complexity at speed, with no room for error.
South Coast Renal operates a private research facility on the Gold Coast, working with commercial sponsors and investigators across multiple studies at once, including Phase 1 to 3 multi-centre programmes. Every decision made on the floor has to be traceable back to a source document.
Each trial arrives with its own protocol, lab manual and pharmacy manual, each running to hundreds of pages. When someone needs a specific answer, it is in there somewhere. Finding it means searching, cross-referencing, and often waiting on a reply before anyone can act.
The same constraint applied everywhere. Patient questions during a visit meant searching documents in real time. Evaluating a new trial opportunity took long enough that it strained resources and put a barrier in front of work the team wanted to take on.
Throughout, the compliance requirement was non-negotiable. South Coast Renal operates under GCP, TGA, Privacy Act and ICH standards. Every answer needs a source and every decision needs a trail, and maintaining that manually across a growing portfolio was becoming unsustainable.
Phase one: getting answers out of the documents
South Coast Renal first saw ORCA Opti in 2025. Yupin recognised it could solve one of the site's biggest bottlenecks: search. After a period of planning and demonstrations, the site began a three-month trial in mid-2026, starting with the core problem of getting accurate, auditable answers quickly.
The trial loaded three active trials into ORCA Opti Assist, protocol, lab manual and pharmacy manual for each. The whole team, coordinators, pharmacists, lab staff and the investigator, could query those documents in plain language and get answers drawn from the source, with the exact passage shown alongside the response.
Yupin's estimates of the change:
| Workflow | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Answering a patient question during a visit | ~30 minutes | ~2 minutes |
| Working through a procedural scenario | ~45 minutes | ~2 minutes |
| Evaluating a new trial opportunity | ~60 minutes | ~5 minutes |
The figures undersell it, and she was quick to say so.
"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."
The audit trail built itself. Every query, answer and source reference logged automatically, meeting GCP documentation requirements that had previously taken manual effort.
By the end of the trial, that phase was closed.
"I feel like we've fixed the information for the coordinator. That's nailed."
South Coast Renal converted from trial to a paying customer.
Phase two: the money nobody had time to look for
The second phase was not on the roadmap. Yupin found it herself.
Clinical trial billing is unusually intricate. Every trial carries its own contract and its own terms, and reconciling what has been delivered against what has been claimed is slow, manual work.
Yupin loaded a trial's invoicing material into a Knowledge Pack and asked ORCA to reconcile it. What had been billed, what was outstanding, what was missing.
The review took a morning, and surfaced tens of thousands of dollars in unclaimed and mis-recorded items on that trial alone.
The clearest example came from an assumption that held on every other study the site runs but not on this one. ORCA caught the discrepancy: reimbursements that had never been claimed. The invoice went in immediately and is now in the system for payment.
The review also surfaced items that had been recorded incorrectly and were quietly blocking claims. Once identified, they were straightforward to fix.
"Me using ORCA to audit in the finance world has just saved so much time and actually so much confusion."
What is next
South Coast Renal and ORCA are now moving from information retrieval towards automating more of the operational spine of the clinic, and mapping that work to the site's compliance obligations.
The effect is twofold. The work becomes more consistent and less time consuming across every study. And because it is mapped to those obligations as it happens, the work itself becomes the evidence that it was done properly. Compliance stops being a separate task and becomes a by-product of doing the job.
In development:
- Screening support, using existing clinical correspondence to surface potential trial participants who might otherwise be missed.
- Milestone and payment tracking, reducing the manual overhead in the invoicing cycle.
- Compliance cross-referencing, so that TGA, ICH, GCP and Privacy Act requirements sit alongside protocol answers rather than in a separate workstream.
- A glomerulonephritis patient registry, with risk stratification, a clinician review interface and an append-only audit trail. This addresses one of the most persistent problems in nephrology research: identifying and retaining patients with low-prevalence conditions across a fragmented clinical landscape.
Yupin's own summary of what is actually being solved:
"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."
"Oversight is critical. Audit the data so that the answers delivered are correct and can be verified, whether that be clinical answers or financial answers. Speed and accuracy is critical."