A Better Approach To eConsent: Flexible Consent Through Enabling Technologies

By Mike Hughes, Chief Product Officer, and Ian Greenfield, Chief Strategy Officer, YPrime

By and large, the clinical trial space’s perceptions surrounding eConsent fall into one of two categories. The first is an oversimplification – the idea that eConsent boils down to “DocuSign for clinical trials.” The second is an overcomplication, with many involved in the space writing off eConsent adoption as too heavy a lift for a clinical research industry already understaffed and stretched thin.

In reality, the ideal approach is likely both more achievable than some believe and more comprehensive than others have conceptualized. Factors on both the technology and compliance sides, as well as variables surrounding patient accessibility and usability, all serve to influence the eConsent paradigm. While this results in a necessarily complex platform, the eClinical technology industry has benefitted by implementing many design techniques and user-centric approaches gleaned from consumer-oriented industries, streamlining the patient experience and creating new avenues for data collection.

Electronic consent, or eConsent, digitalizes the trial participant consent process through increasingly simplified, interactive, educational models designed to improve comprehension and boost engagement. By organizing information about a study into easily navigable, digestible components and supplementing that information with visual and audio elements, trial organizers can give participants greater insight into a study’s design and their part in it, improving retention and enhancing subsequent study activities.