Seen & Heard Health launches AI platform for clinical trial recruitment

Seen & Heard Health launched a proprietary AI recruitment platform today to help sponsors find qualified clinical trial participants across therapeutic areas. The company says the tool is designed to fill a major enrollment gap that slows studies, raises costs and delays treatments reaching patients. Why it matters: - Clinical trial enrollment remains a major bottleneck, and the NIH says 4 out of 5 trials fail today because sponsors cannot fill them adequately. - Faster, more precise recruitment can reduce delays for trial sponsors and get treatments to patients sooner. - The platform targets hard-to-find participants, including patients for common cancers and rare diseases. What happened: - Seen & Heard Health announced the commercial launch of its proprietary AI recruitment platform for clinical trials today in Austin, Texas. - The company built the platform after eight years of front-line experience sourcing patients for public health organizations including the NIH, CDC, WHO and the UN. - Co-founder Curtis Hougland said clinical trials need novel AI tools to address participant shortages as drug discovery speeds up. The details: - The platform augments referral networks, patient databases and digital ads to find “net new” participants beyond traditional recruitment methods. - The system uses unstructured public text, video and image data from the internet, combined with structured datasets such as EHR records. - Self-learning features train the platform using positive and negative recruitment outcomes. - Workflows in the platform are designed to deliver qualified participants matched to specific inclusion and exclusion criteria, rather than general leads for sites to screen. - Seen & Heard Health says its commercial design phase programs recruited up to 86% of patients outside traditional channels. - Those programs also reached an average of 40% faster time to conversion than traditional methods. - The company serves pharmaceutical, life sciences and medical device clients. - Seen & Heard Health says it has sourced more than 10,000 patients across clinical trials, patient ambassador programs and market access programs. - The company received initial funding from FSH and Flora Health, among others. - Seen & Heard Health was named Life Science Reviews’ 2026 AI Recruitment Platform of the Year. - The company shared its announcement link on LinkedIn: the company’s post . Between the lines: - The launch positions Seen & Heard Health as a specialized AI layer on top of existing trial recruitment channels, not a replacement for them. - The focus on “net new” patients suggests the company is aiming at the hardest part of enrollment, where traditional outreach often underperforms. - The use of public data plus EHR records points to a broader shift toward combining consumer-scale AI with clinical workflow tools. What’s next: - Seen & Heard Health says it will use the platform to support clients across healthcare and public health problems that have remained unsolved for decades. - The company is likely to push the platform further into pharmaceutical, life sciences and medical device recruitment as it expands commercial deployment. - Trial sponsors will be watching whether the reported gains in outside-channel recruitment and conversion speed hold at scale.