Thirteen years ago, Casey Chapman, MD, began his clinical research career in an unlikely place — a 12-foot-by-10-foot closet with the shelves ripped out.
Today, as chief medical officer of GI Alliance, he’s helping transform how clinical trials are designed and conducted within community gastroenterology practices, drawing on the lessons he learned from building a research program from the ground up.
“A lot of people walked into that closet with no playbook, and ultimately, you teach yourself,” he said.”You teach yourself — without a mentor or guide — you make mistakes, but you do what it takes to deliver the product that ultimately helps patients.”
GI Alliance, now one of the largest gastroenterology networks in the country with over 1,100 physicians, is working to reimagine community-based research. In April, the company struck a partnership with healthcare technology company Iterative Health. This collaboration expands GI Alliance’s clinical research footprint to 21 active sites conducting more than 80 phase 2 through 4 trials across GI and hepatology indications.
“Iterative Health brings to the table a support, opportunity and expertise in all of the things that our physicians and staff were finding themselves doing that were nonpatient facing,” Dr. Chapman said. “We don’t want physicians documenting and making copies and doing things that are not taking care of people. In the same vein, our clinical research coordinators were doing a lot more than taking care of clinical research patients, and at a certain point in time, it became inefficient.”
This evolving model reflects a broader shift in the field: embedding clinical research into the standard of care, rather than treating it as a separate function.
“It’s not just putting sites together, but putting quality sites together that have the similar excellence in clinical care — where they understand that research is not just a side project that should belong in a closet, but it should be part of the normal clinical workflow,” Dr. Chapman said. “It’s a paradigm shift in how we do research, because of what we have the opportunity to do research on, and the access to the patient population who are in need.”
A key differentiator of the initiative is its emphasis on physician leadership. GI Alliance is ensuring that trial selection is guided not by financial incentives but by three core priorities: patient need, physician passion and — only then — budget.
“Look, you got to make money to run a business. There’s no doubt about that,” Dr. Chapman said. “But that mission fades quickly and you lose physician buy-in, and if you lose physician buy-in, then you’re not going to have a successful mission, especially in research.”
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