The People Behind the Products: Cassandra Tramutola

As Director of Product Management for the Patient Engagement & Recruitment (PE&R) suite, I lead the vision and strategy across all products within this portfolio. I work closely with product owners and managers to shape and manage the roadmap, ensuring alignment with both client needs and broader industry challenges. Partnering with our development teams, I guide product execution from concept to delivery — solving real problems and driving impact. I also bring together cross-functional stakeholders across the organization to ensure smooth collaboration and successful product outcomes at every stage of the product lifecycle.

One of my favorite aspects of this role is the opportunity to collaborate with teams across the organization to solve real-world problems in the market. I especially enjoy connecting directly with customers — hearing their challenges firsthand and then working with our internal teams to strategize solutions that make a meaningful impact.

I went to school for fashion merchandising. After graduating I took a job out of college with the New Jersey Department of Health and Human Services. It was supposed to be a temporary position to learn their newly built system, train the users on the system, and then move on to something else. From that temporary job it blossomed into tech, remaining with the company, and moving more into a business analyst role.

After a few years working for a vendor on the state side I moved on to work with 1 World Sync, a consumer products-based tech company, to run their full back office integration. I started with TrialScope [Citeline’s predecessor company] in 2018. Since then, I’ve contributed to key initiatives, including the Trial Portfolio Websites and Citeline Connect, our enrollment hub platform.

Sometimes the commercial team will come to us with something they’re hearing in the market, and we will brainstorm together to figure out how we can help with this pain point. Our product marketing team will help us to do more research on what else may be out there in the market to solve this pain point and how we may be able to add something more to our solution.

From there, we'll usually draw up a clickable prototype design of what the user interface [UI] may look like. We will then gather feedback via user interviews, asking questions such as: What else are we missing? Is the UI user friendly? Would this help you with any inefficiencies in your day to day?

We also will take it through again internally with our commercial and product marketing teams to make sure we’re coming to market with something that truly does help with a pain point in the industry. Then from there we usually hit the ground running and start to build it.

We sometimes will have a beta program where we are working with real-life users during a UAT [user acceptance testing]/beta period to say here it is. We may test with the sponsor using real-life examples so they can see what reporting metrics may look like. What does the flow look like? Is this right? Are we missing anything?

Then there’s a go-to-market plan that we work on with the product marketing team and sales enablement team to fine tune the messaging before it is released commercially.

It depends. If it’s an add-on feature to a product that’s already out there it could take us four weeks or less. If it’s a full-blown product, it could take a lot longer because there’s a lot that needs to be done there. We need to make sure it’s a fit in the market. We need to figure out packaging and pricing with the commercial team, we need to figure out a go-to-market strategy and plan.

We have a whole project management team that is fantastic. They are the eyes and ears for my team. We will get on monthly calls with customers as well, especially if there’s a new feature, maybe not a full-blown new product. Maybe we’re making an enhancement to a product or enhancement to a feature and we just want to bounce some ideas off them.

In Patient Engagement & Recruitment, we’re actually working on a product called Citeline PatientMatch. It’s a services offering right now, and we’re working with our partners on the real-world data side of the business at Norstella [Citeline’s parent company].

It’s been fantastic to learn that side of the business. We’re working with them to write proprietary algorithms for different protocols to find patients utilizing real-world data. The alerts when a potential patient for the sponsor’s clinical trial has been located will be real time to sites in a platform they can sign into.

There have been a lot of learnings with it, I think. Definitely getting the sites to see the matches as viable patients where they can call the HCPs and get their patients to recruit into the trial. There is a lot of logic behind taking the RWD data and finding patients that may match the I/E criteria of the trial, so definitely learning the different logic.

We’ve learned as we’ve gone, very similar to Connect, as in OK, we need to fine tune the algorithm this way. Or we need to tier the alerts to make sure that the sites are viewing the ones most important and most likely to join or randomize into the clinical trials.

Citeline Connect is a marketplace, so a sponsor comes to us, puts their clinical trial in our marketplace where our 170-plus referral partners can raise their hand and say, “I have patients” or “I don’t have patients that fit these criteria at this time.” This gives them a one-to-many approach. Where with Citeline PatientMatch, we are taking the protocol — and some of these protocols are quite difficult — and writing algorithms specific to the protocol to go into our claims data and find patients who may be a good fit based on different lab results that we’ve seen.

You could say that. I think you could use both approaches, but yes, I definitely think one is probably better suited for certain trials than another. We did very well with Citeline Connect in vaccine studies, where I think PatientMatch may be more applicable to clinical trials that have difficult inclusion/exclusion criteria or are in specific disease/patient segments.

One thing I didn’t know before working on Citeline Connect is that sites actually are overburdened with many portals that they’re logging into. So, the easier it is for them to log in and get the data they need on the patient, the better. They usually don’t need all the bells and whistles, just give them an easy way to find the patient and call the patient. Maybe update a status and they can be in and out of the portal. Based on the sponsor’s trial, they could be working with many different third-party platforms that they have to log into. Sites also don’t want to be overburdened with 50 emails a day; they want one email with the data they need that matter.

I think the biggest thing we learned during Citeline Connect was not to overburden the site. If you overburden the site, they’re not going to call the patients, which in turn equals patients that don’t randomize into the trial. It’s also important to deliver patients of quality, patients that truly do want to join the trial and truly are the right fit for the trial.

It’s similar for Connect and PatientMatch. We’re alerting the sites when a new referral comes in, it’s just a different type of referral. In Citeline Connect, the site user will get an email saying you have a new referral, please log into the portal. All of the information that’s necessary for them to call the referral and see if they truly are good to come in for a screening visit is right in our portal.

Then on the sponsor side, they need to know what’s happening. They want to be able to see downstream what is actually happening with their referral. So, they get a full dashboard that allows them to slice the data in many different ways.

That is the same for PatientMatch. And even though the dashboards are a little different, they’re very similar in the sense that we know how granular the sponsor wants to get. Same thing with the sites, we know how much data they need to truly action on a referral.

I think what differentiates Citeline Patient Engagement & Recruitment products is that it’s not a one-to-one approach. It’s a one-to-many. We can help you find patients that are right for your clinical trial in many different ways, and sometimes you are going to utilize many different means to bring referrals into a clinical trial for Citeline Connect. We were the first, I believe, in the market to have a marketplace.

Normally a sponsor says, “I have to work with this specific referral partner over here, so I have to sign an actual agreement with them, and maybe I’m putting out upwards of $60,000 to work with them and get their materials. And OK, that didn’t work. Now I have to go to another referral partner.” We took that out of it. We said, “Let us take on all of that hard work, sign all the agreements with these referral partners, and you just put the clinical trial on our marketplace, and we have the referral partners that will raise their hand and say, ‘I have those patients.’”

So, we took that burden on for the sponsors. Rather than having that one-to-one approach that would sometimes take months, they can work with three partners or 15 partners that are specialized maybe in this specific disease area that their clinical trial is in.

For Citeline PatientMatch, I don’t think there’s anything like it out there. We are building algorithms that are looking at real-world data. And we are getting to a point where we’re able to message sites on patients that are either at their site within their site network or in a certain radius of their site so that they can call the HCPs to see if these patients are truly right for the clinical trial.

I just adopted a puppy, who is sitting right next to me. So, he’s taken up a lot of my spare time.

Finn. I’m a huge Hunger Games fan, so I got it from one of the characters whose name is Finnick. He’s a rescue who may be part beagle, hound, maybe even golden retriever. I think I’m going to do the dog 23andMe, the equivalent of the people 23andMe.

He’s been doing really good in his new home. But I forget what the puppy life is like, chewing on everything, barking at everything. So, just trying to get used to that again.

I think we definitely want to look into some AI capabilities, specifically on the sponsor end. If you think about the way ChatGPT works, a sponsor could log into Citeline Connect and say, “Tell me how many referrals I got on all of my vaccine trials in HPV or all of my vaccine trials in RSV,” and the AI is able to sort through all of that data, rather than someone having to actually run the query and know what to pick and come back with those numbers. So, just an easier way for them to get the data that they need and to report on the clinical trials, that is definitely something we’re looking into.

There is way more to come with PatientMatch. I definitely think a more robust dashboard will be something that we will roll out as well. Probably a lot more digging into reporting, being able to report in different ways and slice the data even more granularly, which is a big ask from some of our sponsors.