Clinical Research Facility Cuts Core Workflows from up to 45 Minutes to Under Five with ORCA Opti

AOVO (formally South Coast Renal) uses ORCA Opti Assist to get accurate, auditable answers from complex clinical trial documents, with a single morning's billing review also surfacing tens of thousands of dollars in unclaimed items

Thursday, 8 October 2026 - AOVO, a private nephrology research facility on the Gold Coast, has reduced core clinical trial workflows from 30 to 45 minutes to under five using ORCA Opti Assist, while a single morning's billing review also surfaced tens of thousands of dollars in unclaimed items.

AOVO operates a private nephrology research facility on the Gold Coast, working with commercial sponsors and investigators across multiple studies at once, including Phase 1-3 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. AOVO 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.

Getting Answers Out of the Documents

AOVO first saw ORCA Opti in 2025. Operations Manager Yupin Robson 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 the 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.

The results included:

Answering a patient question during a visit reduced from approximately 30 minutes to approximately two minutes

Working through a procedural scenario reduced from approximately 45 minutes to approximately two minutes

Evaluating a new trial opportunity reduced from approximately 60 minutes to approximately five minutes

"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," said Robson.

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," said Robson.

AOVO converted from trial to a paying customer.

Finding the Money Nobody Had Time to Look For

The second phase was not on the roadmap. Robson 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.

Robson 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 thoughts 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, and it came to $6,500 in 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," said Robson.

From Information Retrieval to the Operational Spine of the Clinic

AOVO 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 are:

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. 

The registry addresses one of the most persistent problems in nephrology research: identifying and retaining patients with low-prevalence conditions across a fragmented clinical landscape.

"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," said Robson.

Kat Giudes, Founder and Managing Director of Orca Opti said: "AOVO is the whole idea in one place: connect the documents, get answers in seconds with the source attached, and the audit trail writes itself. No migration, no IT project, just precious clinical time handed back to the team."

For more information about ORCA Opti,  click here.

-ENDS-

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About ORCA Opti

ORCA Opti is the governed AI and compliance platform built for regulated organisations. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Brisbane, ORCA Opti runs inside Microsoft 365 on sovereign infrastructure, giving teams a safe way to operationalise AI while continuously measuring compliance posture against the standards their industry runs on.