In clinical studies, time is of the essence. Every moment counts, as any delay or misuse of time can directly affect when a potentially lifesaving drug can get to the market. Many factors can squander time during a study. Some are inevitably outside of your control, but others aren’t.
Constant in-person meetings, status checks, and message response delays can eat up valuable time in your clinical trial, distracting your team from focusing on the more significant issues. This is where asynchronous collaboration can help your team save time and finish your study successfully. This blog post breaks down everything you need to know about the benefits of asynchronous collaboration.
What is asynchronous collaboration?
First, let’s define synchronous collaboration. This is any communication where two or more people communicate in real time with immediate responses. In-person meetings, desk chats, and phone calls are examples of synchronous collaboration.
Asynchronous collaboration doesn’t occur in real time and includes forms of communication like emails, project management updates, or, depending on the context, direct messaging.
There are benefits to each type of collaboration, and both are essential to a successful trial. But not all communication needs to be synchronous. Asynchronous collaboration offers a host of benefits for trial management, as it gives your team freedom and flexibility to complete your study efficiently.
4 Benefits of Asynchronous Collaboration in Trial Management?
Increase Focus Time to Increase Productivity
One of the biggest reasons to move to asynchronous collaboration is to give your team more time to focus on their work. With synchronous collaboration, a person’s attention is constantly being pulled in another direction. There are always meetings to attend, interruptive messages to respond to, and phone calls to pick up.
This constant need to collaborate in real-time removes the ability of someone to focus for long periods on a particular problem. These long periods of focus are imperative for addressing the more complex issues that arise in a clinical study and ensuring that your team stays productive during the trial. Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) on whom your trial depends, are extremely busy physicians and/or academics whose work demands uninterrupted time. Asynchronous collaboration provides everyone with space to focus on their critical work.
Reduce Hard and Soft Costs
Asynchronous collaboration can help lower your trial’s operational costs by reducing the number of in-person meetings, expensive conferencing systems, and other communication distractions. Fewer meetings mean lower travel costs, lower opportunity costs from the loss of productivity (due to the number of meetings), and reduced hard costs in conference software or equipment. The combined effect of the study is lower overall costs.
Increase Decision-Making Speed
Asynchronous collaboration has the added benefit of increasing decision-making speed by clearing the lines of communication and allowing everyone to contribute.
Not everyone may have the time, ability, or option to voice their opinion in a face-to-face or teleconference meeting. But with asynchronous collaboration, everyone can contribute, which allows for more diverse ideas and an easier job of making decisions by those in charge.
Plus, you don’t have to wait around for everyone’s schedules to align before you can talk through a decision.
Facilitate Alignment on Key Initiatives
Asynchronous collaboration and collaboration, if done on an integrated platform, records the contributions of everyone involved and is available for all to see, aiding in the final decision-making. This helps colleagues gain alignment on critical initiatives.
These records also help to create a history of activities, actions and decisions for reference during the trial and auditing after. This improves consistency and compliance.
These four benefits improve clinical trial efficiency, essential to implementing and completing the trial safely and effectively.
This efficiency will increase revenue and help those in need by getting the drugs to market faster. In order to realize these benefits, you will need to utilize an integrated, cloud-based communications and collaboration platform.
3 Asynchronous Best Practices
Set Deadlines and Communication Expectations
With synchronous communication, the expectation is that someone will respond immediately. But with asynchronous collaboration, things are different. There are no clear rules or guidelines on when someone should or has to respond.
Setting these guidelines is imperative to successful asynchronous collaboration, so it’s essential to set clear deadlines and expectations. Perhaps it’s responding to messages within a day or emails within 24 hours. Whatever your guidelines, set clear expectations to ensure that your study runs as smoothly as possible.
Use Labels and Tags
By the very nature of asynchronous collaboration, there will be different times when messages are sent, received, read, and responded to. Therefore, it’s important to have a system to determine if a communication is in review, needs feedback, requires input, or is approved.
This is where labels and tags come in. These tools can be instrumental in letting colleagues know when a communication has been reviewed or approved. In this way, they also help with decision-making and gaining alignment between colleagues and will help the trial run as smoothly as possible.
Standardize Processes
While asynchronous communication lacks some of the benefits of synchronous communication, it’s important to remember that asynchronous communication is also about collaboration. It’s the review and approval of information in accordance with study protocol. Standardizing your process will save everyone time and resources and ensure safe and compliant execution. An integrated, cloud-based communications and process management platform will automate your process creating even greater efficiency.
This is where a platform like Cloud Concinnity comes. Concinnity’s integrated, compliant, process management platform centralizes all information & communications, standarizes, automates & tracks all required processes adding efficiency, speed and risk mitigation & driving significant positive financial impact.
Implementing Cloud Concinnity for Asynchronous Collaboration
The best way to implement asynchronous collaboration is with a platform like Cloud Concinnity. While other smart programs may offer communication options or large quantities of information, Cloud Concinnity offers a flexible, cloud-based software that is built specifically for clinical trials. It allows researchers to collaborate within the platform and syncs into other trials, ensuring the successful and timely completion of a trial through effective use of asynchronous collaboration.
If you have any questions or would like to request a demo, feel free to reach out. At Cloud Concinnity, we’re here to help.