How To Optimize Clinical Supply Chain Management

Successful execution of clinical trials requires the orchestration of multiple moving parts, with everything from protocol design and patient visit schedules, to lab kits and biological samples needing to seamlessly line up to ensure on-time, on-budget delivery of high-quality data. Yet, sponsors have traditionally lacked the tools to optimize clinical supply chain management and avoid the many pitfalls they face, creating a range of problems around compliance, traceability, and more. In this playbook, we explain how a sponsor freed itself from those problems by adopting an eClinical Supply Chain Management platform.

The need for a new way of working is clear. Today, increasingly complex clinical trials are straining supply chain management. The number of endpoints per clinical trial rose 86% over a 10-year period.1 Over the same timeframe, clinical trials expanded geographically. In phase 3 studies, the average number of countries doubled while the number of sites rose 63%. Even after that geographic growth, phase 1 and 2 studies remained the most complex based on the numbers of distinct and total procedures; by extension, they became a major opportunity for clinical supply chain optimization.

For study teams, the trends mean more specimens need to be collected from more sites in more countries. If the clinical supply chain is poorly managed, sponsors can struggle to cope with the complexity, leading to time and budget overruns, compliance issues, increased patient burden, and data integrity problems. The impact of unoptimized supply chain management extends across the clinical trial process. Here, we look at the problems created in four key areas.