Should You Incorporate Home Nurses Into Your Next Clinical Trial?

Decentralized clinical trials (DCTs) involving home visits by mobile research nurses had already been around for about 17 years when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, but you wouldn’t have known it from the reaction of many sponsors and CROs. Certainly many had been tangentially aware of DCTs, but the incorporation of DCT methods into clinical studies was not the norm. As a result, those whose studies depended on participants being able to visit sites for all of their treatments and testing found themselves scrambling for solutions when sites were forced to shut down virtually overnight.