PointClickCare’s Study Buddy

A nursing home can generate years of patient records and still struggle to turn them into one chart that fits inside a grant application. PointClickCare says its new tool, Study Buddy, can take long-term care data and produce grant-submission-ready evidence in minutes instead of the months that usually go into custom analysis. (tmcnet.com) The company launched Study Buddy on April 9, 2026 as an artificial-intelligence research platform for academic and clinical teams working with long-term care data. PointClickCare described it as a way to generate real-world evidence directly from the records already flowing through its network. (tmcnet.com) Real-world evidence is the medical version of learning from receipts instead of recipes. Instead of running a brand-new clinical trial, researchers look at what actually happened to real patients in routine care and ask whether a treatment, staffing pattern, or care program changed outcomes. (pharmasalmanac.com) Long-term care is a rich place to do that because residents often have multiple chronic conditions, complicated medication lists, and long stays that show what happens over time. PointClickCare says its life sciences business has collected more than 20 years of long-term and post-acute care data from the vast majority of senior care facilities across North America. (pointclickcare.com) That matters because long-term care residents are central to a lot of treatment decisions but are often missing from traditional clinical trials. PointClickCare’s own description of the market says its longitudinal data can show treatment patterns, disease progression, provider encounters, claims, and outcomes in a population that drugmakers and researchers often underserve. (pharmasalmanac.com) The money side is just as important as the science side. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services already ties nursing home oversight to auditable staffing submissions, public staffing data, turnover, tenure, and the Five-Star Quality Rating System, so providers are under pressure to prove performance with numbers, not anecdotes. (cms.gov) Federal rules are also tightening. A Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services final rule published May 10, 2024 set new minimum staffing standards for long-term care facilities, with key implementation dates beginning in 2026 for non-rural facilities, which raises the value of tools that can quickly connect staffing and care patterns to reported outcomes. (federalregister.gov) Study Buddy fits into a broader PointClickCare strategy of turning its data footprint into artificial-intelligence products. In 2025 and 2026, the company also rolled out tools like Chart Advisor, Referral Advisor, and Discharge Intel, each aimed at a different bottleneck in skilled nursing, admissions, or care transitions. (prnewswire.com 1) (prnewswire.com 2) (prnewswire.com 3) The pitch is not that Study Buddy finds new data. The pitch is that it lets researchers query an existing long-term care dataset through an artificial-intelligence interface, so a team chasing a grant deadline can get tables and evidence faster than if it had to wait for a custom analytics project. (pharmasalmanac.com) (tmcnet.com) That could appeal to universities, health systems, and drug companies at a moment when grant funding is tight. The National Institutes of Health says its Data Book now includes fiscal year 2025 grant statistics, and the whole point of a tighter funding environment is that weak applications die faster, which makes ready-made evidence more valuable. (nih.gov) So this launch is really about a neglected corner of healthcare becoming easier to measure. If PointClickCare can turn nursing home records into something researchers can cite, submit, and reuse without a long analytics queue, then long-term care data stops being a warehouse and starts acting more like a lab. (tmcnet.com) (pointclickcare.com)