Choosing the Best Clinical Technology for Your Study

What should be top of mind for stakeholders when they are deciding what clinical technology is best for their individual studies?

Easy: I think top of mind is kind of challenging. I think it has to be user experience—if you are adding a technology to something, for me, it should really be about making the trial easier and not harder, which is not something I think the industry always succeeds at. Also, if you are adding clinical technology, it really has to improve the quality of data. I think people should be looking at evidence of that and it is really challenging when you think about all the different things when you're selecting clinical technology, but when I think about adding technology burden to whether it be sites, patients, or internally at the sponsor or CRO—the administrative burden, financial burden, transparency, reliability, visibility, I could go on and on, but again, all of these things do add up to impacting the timelines of a study, and something that I think that during COVID, people perhaps didn't spend as much time on as I see them doing now, is really thinking through the regulatory, compliance, privacy, even data security, and can technology scale? I think that is really important, because for me, that makes a huge difference as to whether or not a particular technology should be selected.

Again, I think that perhaps this also ties back into your previous question, but we keep hearing from sites at the administrative burden that we place on them with all of this clinical technology they have. They have dozens of software applications and portals from different sponsors and vendors that they have to access, so it is really fragmented for them. Again, I just think that we're now hearing that site staff attrition rates are increasing. We are hearing that trial complexity is going up and I have heard people using the words around site capacity as being at crisis levels, so that that's pretty scary. [According to research], 56% of sites say trials are more complex than three years ago, and they actually cite that next generation tools and third-party tools—third party vendors—are the source of the complexity, and at the same time, 53% of sites don't have sufficient bandwidth to run a trial like this. This to me is why we do all have to come together as an industry and that why these particular topics—we do need to spend time all coming together and really trying to solve this for sites, or we're all going to be very unsuccessful.