Uncertainty With Artificial Intelligence at the Site-Level

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Jimmy Bechtel, vice president, site engagement, SCRS, discussed key challenges and initiatives at the site-level. AI's impact on sites is significant, with uncertainty around its implementation. Diversity requirements pose challenges, and technology overload is a major issue due to inconsistent tech stacks and financial burdens on sites. Bechtel also highlighted some initiatives that SCRS is currently working on and gave an overview of the most recent Global Site Solutions Summit.

A transcript of Bechtel’s conversation with ACT can be found below.

ACT: What are some current challenges or trends for sites that you’ve been hearing about recently?

Bechtel: AI (artificial intelligence) is definitely the new hot topic for the sites. It's not necessarily a challenge right now, there's a lot of unknowns, and sites don't want it to become a challenge and things like this tend to become a challenge. They happen at the sponsor, CRO, and service provider levels, and then the sites suffer the ramifications of whatever decisions are made at the industry level, so that that's definitely one that the sites have a big question mark around and there's a lot of discussion, a lot of thirst for information, and how is this being used? How can I use it as a site, etc.?

Then diversity, I think, is also a big challenge at the site level, knowing how to meet the needs. Even farther back from that, what the needs are going to be, what are sponsors and CROs going to be asking of sites with diversity plans and things like that? How can they be prepared to meet those? Should they be presented with some sort of diversity-level requirement—an inclusive-level requirement on their clinical trials?