How A COVID-19 Clinical Trial Used Technology For Successful eSource Data Capture

Transcribing data sucks! But clinical research coordinators must manually transcribe patient data. It’s extremely inefficient, time consuming and highly error prone.

Abstraction of electronic health record (EHR) data and entry into case report forms (CRFs) represent a major barrier for timely data and decision making in trials. The COVID-19 crisis has imposed immense urgency for fast, high quality clinical trial data, and helped make clear that the traditional solution to just ‘throw more people at the problem’ is no longer sufficient.

The medical records in sites’ EHRs serve as the source data for clinical trial participants. These data must be manually transcribed into the study database/electronic data capture (EDC) system, a time-consuming task that adds to the burden clinical researchers are facing in this unprecedented pandemic. The typical challenges that sites run into when transcribing data include:

• A burdensome, manual process, dependent on “swivel chair” interoperability between the EHR and study database
• Transcription errors
• Delays in reporting and payments
• Time-consuming responsiveness to monitors performing source data verification (SDV) and issuing queries, causing staff burnout, study delays and driving up the cost of 100% SDV

The key to making all of this easier is technology that integrates patient data to make your workflows easier.