Track new clinical trial registrations for sponsor and vendor leads with Apify and OpenAI

Pulls newly registered studies from ClinicalTrials.gov through Apify and scores each by the actor's opportunity score, sponsor type, phase, match with your conditions, planned enrollment and recency. New registrations show who is about to recruit patients and buy trial services. Built for CROs, recruitment and site-network teams, trial-software vendors and healthcare analysts. Registry data describes studies, not patients.

How it works

1. Daily schedule / manual run reads every setting from Config. A weekly schedule uses the same Config to send a report instead of running the actor.
2. Starts the Apify actor asynchronously, then waits and polls the run; FAILED, ABORTED, TIMED-OUT or too many polls stop with an error.
3. Downloads the dataset, validates rows and dedupes within the run and across runs (workflow static data, dedupeMemoryDays).
4. A transparent rule score runs first, then an LLM chain with a structured output parser reads each record against your plain-English aiCriteria and returns a fit score, verdict, summary, outreach angle and red flags. Calls are batched with a delay for rate limits, retried, and fall back to the rule score if the model fails.
5. Upserts every row to Google Sheets. Hot rows go to Slack as one approve / dismiss message (send-and-wait, 24 h limit) and the decision is written back to the sheet; warm rows go to an HTML email digest; cold rows stay in the sheet.
6. Weekly report: reads the sheet, summarises the last 7 days (tiers, approvals, top 10) and emails it.
7. A separate Error Trigger branch posts any failure to Slack.

Setup (about 15 minutes)

1. Create an HTTP Header Auth credential: name Authorization, value Bearer <APIFY_API_TOKEN> (Apify Console > Settings > API & Integrations). Select it on the 3 Apify HTTP nodes.
2. Create a Google Sheet with a tab named in sheetTab and a header row matching the sheet columns (see Upsert to Google Sheets, plus status and reviewedAt). Paste its ID into googleSheetId.
3. Connect OpenAI (or swap the chat model sub-node for Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama...), Slack and Gmail; set slackChannelId and digestEmail in Config (also the channel on Slack: error alert).
4. In Config set actorInput.daysBack, searchTerm and phases, then conditionKeywords, targetPhases and minEnrollment. Turn on sponsorRollup in actorInput only if you want one row per sponsor (the key then needs changing).
5. Write your ideal-lead description in aiCriteria; set aiWeight (0 = rules only, 1 = AI only).
6. Run once manually, check the sheet, then activate.

Customize

• Edit weights in Score new studies (opportunity score 35%, industry sponsor 15, phase 15, condition match 20, enrollment 10, recent 5).
• Studies are keyed by NCT id, so each registration alerts once.
• Swap Gmail/Slack for Teams, Discord, HubSpot, Airtable, etc. Each delivery node only reads $json.

Disclosure: I maintain these Apify actors (account transparent_meteorite). The actor is a paid pay-per-event Apify tool; check its Store page for current pricing before scheduling.