To be of any value to someone doing clinical research, you need to know a bit of study design and data analysis (epidemiology and biostatistics are graduate programs where this is generally taught). Can you wrangle data from an electronic data warehouse (medical records data for example) or can you be the student who creates a survey that asks the right questions in the right order, gets approved by the board that oversees human subjects research, recruits enough people to draw conclusions from the data, clean it (what do you do with missing data or typos like someone weighing 800 pounds) and write it into a paper. The toughest part is coming up with the question, the testable hypothesis. That sends you backwards into the literature on whatever topic interests you to see what other people have done and where they've left off with "more research is needed" which is how every one of these papers end.
Tons of these little projects get done by medical students who need a thesis. Meanwhile, most clinical research is either funded by the NIH or by industry and asks are patients better off with a combination of drugs A, B and C compared with A and B, where A+B is standard of care. There are bunches of laboratory tests, diagnostic imagining, follow-up for adverse events and longer disease free progression or improvement, or a slowing of decline, on the outcome of interest. The protocols are often written by consortiums of experts or pharmaceutical companies who are testing new compounds. If a college student or recent college graduate gets a job in such a study it might be limited to clerical work such as downloading and printing consent forms, scanning and uploading the forms, submitting forms to regulatory bodies and so forth. It won't come close to getting you published.
I have seen some people do some "research" in someplace like the emergency department where there are a few studies going on and the research assistants are on the prowl for conditions such as sports related traumatic brain injuries, older adults with altered mental status, and ectopic pregnancies. If one of those folks shows up, you see if they meet the inclusion and exclusion criteria and approach them for their consent. Maybe you ask some questions (collecting data). Maybe you collect some information from the chart. That sort of thing. Doesn't usually result in a publication for the recruiter who didn't have a say in study design or analysis or writing which is pretty much what is required for authorship. It is usually a job or a volunteer gig for a few months or a year. You get to do something more interesting and useful than putting blankets in the warmer and stocking shelves and you see how the emergency department works. Not saying that these jobs are common but I've seen them on applications.
