Gain The ePRO Advantage With Real-Time Data Collection

By Melissa Newara, Senior Director, Subject Matter Expertise

Every clinical research professional has a story about paper diaries that they have collected and, more specifically, the pain of paper.

When I was a coordinator, it was not unusual to receive all of my adolescent participants 18-month follow-up assessments stuffed into one envelope written in the same pen. You could see the handwriting degrade across the 18-month follow up, since the assessments were obviously completed at the same time. There were often coffee stains or even sometimes ice cream marks all over the questionnaires. Inevitably, there would be pages with answers missing or maybe whole pages stuck together with that ice cream and unreadable. Sometimes participants would write in new response options on their rating scales that they thought were more appropriate to how they felt. These are the issues you get when using paper PRO.