Clinical trials have under-represented Black and Hispanic patients for decades, and the usual explanations point at mistrust. This study points somewhere less comfortable: the patients were in the records and nobody found them.
Short answer: A Cleveland Clinic and Dyania Health study found AI-driven chart review identified 36.6% Black patients for a rare disease trial, against 7.1% through routine screening, and that 29 of 30 AI-identified matches had not been found by traditional recruitment.
Key takeaways
- Cleveland Clinic and Dyania Health published research in March 2026 showing a medically trained large language model system screening electronic medical records to identify eligible.
- 90 live listings in this category publish a rate, at a median top-of-range of $120 an hour and a ceiling of $400.
- The work is remote contract work, asynchronous, with no set hours and no guaranteed volume.
- Applications screen on a short skills assessment rather than a resume or interview.
What was reported
The finding
Cleveland Clinic and Dyania Health published research in March 2026 showing a medically trained large language model system screening electronic medical records to identify eligible patients for a rare disease clinical trial. AI-identified patients showed 36.6% Black representation compared with 7.1% identified through routine screening, and 29 of the 30 patients identified as trial matches through the AI system had not been identified through traditional recruitment. Separately, a cross-modal deep learning framework called DocTr, which recommends clinician investigators using medical claims, unstructured trial documents and historical enrollment relationships, improved fairness scores related to patient race and ethnicity by up to 25% compared with ground-truth enrollment.
Cleveland Clinic and Dyania Health screened electronic medical records with a medically trained language model. AI-identified patients were 36.6% Black against 7.1% through routine screening, and 29 of 30 AI-identified matches had not surfaced through traditional recruitment at all.
What the listings pay
That is a finding about screening rather than about willingness to participate. Manual chart review has limits, and those limits were not distributing evenly across patients.
| # | Role | Advertised rate | Platform |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Healthcare Attorney (BigLaw Firms) | $140 to $400 an hour | micro1 |
| 2 | Cybersecurity Research Expert, Offensive Security & Vulnerability Research | $200 to $250 an hour | Mercor |
| 3 | Senior Design Expert - Paid AI Design Research Study | $150 to $250 an hour | Mercor |
| 4 | Disease-Area Clinician, Trial Endpoints & Prescribing | $150 to $230 an hour | Mercor |
| 5 | Pharma Commercial Forecasting Expert, Launch Curves | $130 to $210 an hour | Mercor |
| 6 | Therapeutic Area & Clinical Survey Expert | $200 to $200 an hour | Mercor |
| 7 | Clinician (Oncology / Hematology) | $160 to $200 an hour | micro1 |
| 8 | Military/Veteran Mental Health Experts | $100 to $200 an hour | micro1 |
| 9 | Multilingual Primary Care Physician (MD): Clinical Documentation & AI Evaluation | $170 to $190 an hour | Mercor |
| 10 | Medical Safety Expert | $140 to $190 an hour | Mercor |
Source: 90 live listings on this board that publish a rate, read directly from each posting on 2026-09-06. Listings without a published rate are excluded rather than estimated.
How this compares across the board
A rate only means something next to the alternatives. This is every category we track with at least five listings publishing a rate, ranked by median top-of-range, so you can see where this work sits rather than taking a single number on trust.
| Category | Listings | Median low | Median top | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Legal | 95 | $100 | $140 | $400 |
| Medical | 68 | $77 | $120 | $400 |
| Consulting | 45 | $80 | $120 | $280 |
| Finance | 94 | $80 | $110 | $280 |
| Engineering | 114 | $70 | $100 | $300 |
| Research/PhD | 132 | $70 | $90 | $280 |
| Writing | 36 | $40 | $80 | $280 |
| Bilingual | 78 | $44 | $52 | $120 |
| Annotation | 25 | $12 | $24 | $120 |
Same source and date as above. Categories are matched on listing title, so a role can appear in more than one.
What it means for you
It also raises the stakes on getting the models right, which is the part clinicians get paid for. A screening system that encodes the wrong eligibility logic fails silently and at scale. Across 90 live clinical, trial and biomedical listings on our board that publish a rate, the median top-of-range is $120 an hour, reaching $400.
Why this is an argument for more clinical review, not less
A model that reads charts well enough to find patients nobody else found is also a model that can systematically exclude patients for a reason nobody notices. Both properties come from the same capability.
Eligibility criteria are written in clinical language that carries meaning beyond the literal words. Whether a comorbidity is disqualifying, whether a prior therapy counts, whether a lab value at a particular timepoint is in range, are judgments a protocol implies rather than states.
The DocTr work is instructive on the same point. Improving fairness scores by up to 25% required deliberately optimising for demographic fairness alongside accuracy, which is a design decision someone had to make rather than an emergent property.
What clinical evaluation listings ask for
Clinical trial experience is the most direct qualification: protocol design, eligibility assessment, screening, or investigator-side work. Knowing how a criterion behaves in practice is the specific value.
Therapeutic area depth raises the rate, particularly in rare disease and oncology where eligibility logic is most intricate and the consequences of a mis-screen are largest.
As with all clinical listings on this board, there is no patient contact and no protected health information involved. You are evaluating model reasoning, not reviewing live records.
Who should apply
Two checks before you spend time on an application. Confirm the role accepts applicants from your country with the eligibility checker, since a meaningful share of listings carry location requirements. Then run the advertised rate through the take-home calculator, because this is contract work and the headline figure is before self-employment tax.
Applications complete on the hiring platform and usually take a few minutes, with a short skills assessment in place of an interview. Fill in every credential, language and professional background field on your profile. Those are what route you to the better paid listings, and most applicants leave them blank.
Frequently asked questions
What did the Cleveland Clinic study find?
AI-driven chart review identified 36.6% Black patients for a rare disease trial compared with 7.1% through routine screening, and 29 of 30 AI-identified matches had not been found by traditional recruitment.
Does this mean AI fixes trial diversity?
It shows a screening gap rather than solving enrolment. The patients were already in the records; conventional review was not surfacing them evenly.
What is DocTr?
A cross-modal deep learning framework recommending clinician investigators from claims data, trial documents and enrolment history, which improved race and ethnicity fairness scores by up to 25%.
Why do clinicians still need to review these systems?
Eligibility criteria carry clinical meaning beyond their literal wording. A model encoding the wrong logic fails silently and at scale.
What does clinical AI evaluation pay?
Across 90 live clinical and biomedical listings publishing a rate, the median top-of-range is $120 an hour, reaching $400.
Is PHI involved?
No. You evaluate model reasoning using clinical knowledge. No patient contact and no protected health information.
What experience do these listings want?
Clinical trial experience across protocol design, eligibility assessment or investigator-side work, with therapeutic area depth raising the rate.
Sources
See every live role
The full board updates several times a week, with the advertised rate on each listing and closed roles removed.