Seven Southlake Carroll students spent part of their summer more than 8,000 miles from home, visiting hospitals and rural clinics in Gujarat, India, as part of a healthcare outreach trip focused on clinical research and patient access.
The May trip was organized through Claidex, a healthcare technology organization founded by Carroll Senior High School graduate and Cornell University student Sahaj Satani.
From May 24-30, the students visited Modi Neuro Clinic, IndoVasc and several nearby rural clinics, where they worked alongside physicians and learned firsthand how clinical trials can create additional treatment options for patients.
Their role went beyond observation.
The students helped develop educational materials for clinicians and patients in English, Hindi and Gujarati, while also learning how Claidex is used to identify clinical trials for which a patient may qualify and connect them with recruiting hospitals.
During the trip, physicians used Claidex to connect an acute stroke patient and a vascular patient with active thrombectomy trials at hospitals in Ahmedabad — opportunities that may otherwise have gone unidentified.
For Satani, bringing Carroll students into the work was especially meaningful. Claidex itself grew out of experiences he had while working as a medical assistant and in clinical research, where he repeatedly saw patients who had no idea they might qualify for a nearby clinical trial.
He eventually built Claidex to help close that gap. The HIPAA-compliant platform allows physicians to enter a brief summary of a patient’s condition and location and search for relevant clinical trials, including those available nearby or virtually.
But the Gujarat trip also gave the participating students something harder to replicate in a classroom: a firsthand look at medicine and public health in a very different setting.
Several of the students were connected to a club Satani first started while attending Carroll, and that effort is now coming back to Southlake. An upcoming Claidex club at Carroll Senior High School will give students opportunities to study clinical research, examine why trials fail and conduct analyses of their own.
Claidex is also continuing to expand its work in rural communities in Texas and Oklahoma.
For the students who traveled to India, though, the impact was already tangible: they helped create resources, worked directly with physicians and saw patients connected with new treatment possibilities in real time.