The clinical trial field is changing rapidly. Some of these changes have been spurred by the pandemic, while others have been in the works for several years as technologies and trial needs evolve. One of the most recent changes is the rise in hybrid and decentralized clinical trials. In this blog post, we summarize five tools and tips that can help the best practices you need to support clinical trial oversight across a hybrid decentralized clinical trial.
5 Tips and Tools to Improve Clinical Trial Oversight in Hybrid and Decentralized Clinical Trials
As you may be aware, hybrid and decentralized clinical trials allow researchers to successfully conclude a clinical trial while conducting it partially or primarily remotely. What you may not know is that a recent EY-Parthenon survey found that respondents estimate that 50% of clinical trials will be hybrid or decentralized by 2024. While hybrid or decentralized clinical trials bring with them a host of benefits, they do introduce new difficulties based on their differences from traditional clinical trials.
Here are five best practices to keep in mind to help mitigate these differences and enhance the benefits of hybrid and decentralized clinical trials:
Centralize Your Data Collection
Segregate Blinded Vs. Unblinded Data
Communication is The Key to Success
Use Software To Automate Meeting Scheduling
Standardize Your Reporting
Centralize Your Data Collection
Hybrid or decentralized clinical trials aren’t perfect, and their most decisive benefit – the remote aspects that benefit the patients and the researchers –requires thoughtfulness and preparation to empower your team to collect and store critical clinical data.
As a starting point, we recommend selecting a centralized data collection tool that includes:
A cloud-based system that can be accessed from each location.
Strong security measures to ensure that only authorized.
An intuitive user experience that promotes adoption across all of your clinical sites.
If you’re on the hunt for just such a system, The Cloud Concinnity Platforms has you covered. This tool was built specifically for clinical trial oversight committees and integrates with your trial’s electronic data communication platform to help centralize and systemize your data. You can learn more and sign up for a demo here.
Automate Blinded Vs. Unblinded Data Segregation
As your clinical trial is taking place across a hybrid or decentralized landscape, it’s critical to introduce automation to help you manage the segregation of blinded and unblinded data. Not only does automating data segregation replace the work that goes into the manual management of sharing blinded/unblinded data with stakeholders and participants, but it also helps to mitigate any risks that can come from manual data sharing and reporting.
Communication Is the Key to Success
Since your research team will be communicating remotely - across cities and even time zones - strong communication guidance is a necessity for success. Given the remote aspects of hybrid decentralized clinical trials, you should anticipate higher levels of asynchronous communication – note review, comments, emails, etc. We recommend utilizing a system like Cloud Concinnity to help support these needs.
Use Software To Automate Meeting Scheduling
A key challenge for managing hybrid and decentralized trials is that your administrative team is disconnected across locations, which means getting meetings scheduled can be a bit of a pain. There’s countless back and forth, which can introduce costly delays. Instead, we recommend using available tools (like Cloud Concinnity) to automate meeting scheduling and remove the friction that comes with manually scheduling meetings.
Standardize and Batch Your Reporting
By now, you should be aware of the benefits of centralizing your data and using automation to help eliminate some of the friction that can come from hybrid or decentralized clinical trials. Work with your team to standardize the reporting that you deliver to the clinical trial oversight committee, then use a system (like Cloud Concinnity) to automate and batch report creation.
To best implement your next hybrid or decentralized clinical trial, you’ll need software like Cloud Concinnity, which offers remote data collection all in one place, along with the ability to communicate efficiently and virtually.
For a free demo, please reach out to us today. We’re here to help.