Implementing Technology into Clinical Operations Workflows

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Cameron Breze, product manager, Inovalon, discussed challenges in patient recruitment for clinical trials. Traditional recruitment methods, such as manual outreach, are now less efficient due to accessibility issues. Breze highlighted technology as a way to address recruitment challenges, which can be leveraged to automate and streamline processes, reducing labor intensity and errors.

ACT: How is technology being used to alleviate some of the current challenges in patient recruitment?

Breze: I think there's certainly some give and take when it comes to different biopharma sponsors and then clinical research sites trying to navigate their relationship in terms of what does their trial recruitment effort look like, and how is it going to change with the technology and tools that are available. I think there's always a hesitation with doctors, with clinical researchers, who are already overloaded to learn a more complex tool, a more complex software. I think with a lot of the broader, more consumer facing apps, like you think of the main social media apps, very easy to use when you're ordering food delivery, they've done everything possible to make that experience as easy as possible. I think a lot of that does not necessarily extend into healthcare, so sometimes those apps or technology can be quite difficult to use, so I think there's a an institutional hesitation from both sides to incorporate that technology just because it will send things back quite a bit in terms of how much time you need to sync and train and maintain things. That's something that industry is quite focused on in terms of building out these tools. Yes, we want them to make the impact that we know they're technically capable of making. There's also the human element of building things people actually want to use and simplify their lives, so in any way that we can automate or simplify those workflows, I think that's the focus of technology going forward.

Then again, to hit home on the point with the clinical research sites having quite a site burden, where, if you can imagine, back in the day, if you had a trial for it, with two, three, four, five, exclusion criteria with age, demographic, a particular condition, someone can pretty simply read through or query the EHR and find that information, but when you get to a trial that has the complexity of 15, 20, 30 criteria, even just reading through a list and checking off, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, that's a pretty labor intensive process when you have to do that on a per patient basis. There are many, many opportunities for error. If you think of a big clinical research team where Person A was working on it yesterday, they're out of office this week, and then someone else is picking up the slack and taking care of their responsibilities for the next few days. If there's communication with them, that's great, but things always kind of fall through your cracks. That's sort of how things work, and having technology there protects you and de-risks a little bit and gives you a more standardized and higher quality output in terms of the research product you put forward. I'm very excited to use those automated elements and structure our efforts in a way that are more scalable, reproducible, and streamlined for everyone involved.