Practical Patient Convenience Tips For Vaccine Trials

By Dave Espenshade

When thinking of clinical trials and the concept of patient convenience, one must consider the increasing complexity of protocols and how much is being asked of patients that are enrolled. Strict inclusion criteria results in increased scrutiny to find the right patient, and keep that patient enrolled in the study. In rare disease and immunoncology, for example, ideal study participant candidates often live hundreds of miles or more away from the research site which increases the challenges of enrolling and retaining those participants. Study sponsors and CROs are instituting programs to remove financial and logistical burdens to ensure that these participants remain in the study for the duration, so they don’t have to find yet another “needle in a haystack.”

But what about vaccine clinical trials? Vaccine trials in general turn this concept upside down. Instead of looking for a rare patient, researchers are looking for healthy volunteers – and large volumes of them. To bring urgent treatments to the masses, retaining every single participant to ensure that clinical trial data is compliant is paramount.

With COVID-19 dominating the headlines, many study sponsors and CROs have turned to Greenphire to help with initiating patient and site-centric technology solutions for their clinical trials in 2020. In this short blog, I’d like to share with you some of the insights we’ve gleaned from working with top sponsors, CROs and sites on COVID-19 and other vaccine studies. These may be helpful as you plan for 2021.