Articles From Our Expert Network

71. Calculating A Site Effort Score (SES): It's Not What You Think 5/9/2017

    With all of the focus on patient centricity and patient-centered clinical trials, it’s easy for the focus on investigative sites to be lost. Prior to the patient-centricity movement, at least for a time, site engagement was the concept du jour in the industry with conferences, articles, and surveys exploring and expounding on the importance of enhancing site relationships. And while some still believe that “patient centricity starts and ends with the investigative site,”¹ it seems that the needs of the sites only get cursory attention these days. Not to detract from the importance of patient centricity, but without engaged and efficiently operating sites, many of the patient-centric initiatives will fall short of expectations. As someone who obsesses about root cause analyses, I have naturally been thinking about the primary root causes for why we seem to have lost focus and interest in the sites and what we can do about it.

72. Do Patient Recruitment Advertising & Awareness Campaigns Really Work? 3/29/2017

    Sponsors, CROs, and investigative sites are often faced with two key challenges when planning and managing clinical trials: getting patients recruited and determining how much to spend to find and enroll them. With the explosion of e-recruitment tactics (e.g., social media and digital advertising) and e-recruitment service providers over the past five years or so, there seems to be an industry-wide perception that the cost to enroll patients should be dramatically reduced compared with the use of more traditional advertising and awareness tactics.

73. Accelerating Clinical Trial Patient Engagement & Retention Through Mobile Technology 3/23/2017

    This article assesses the mobile health apps market, key features of successful apps, and associated timelines and costs for developing apps that engage patients across categories and conditions.

74. How Many Team Members Does It Take To Determine The Study Status? 2/16/2017

    Sitting on one of those long, painful, study status update calls recently, I was reminded of the famous light bulb joke. You know the one: “How many engineers (lawyers, politicians, etc.) does it take to change a light bulb?”  I was both flabbergasted and frustrated that, after 45 minutes, the project manager was still wading through status updates from a myriad of CRO and vendor partners and CRAs — just to figure out where the study was from a site activation and enrollment standpoint.  

75. Improving Patient Retention & Engagement Through Health Programs 12/21/2016

    Patient recruitment is often highlighted as the key factor in ensuring clinical study success. Ensuring on-time enrolments of patients, investigators, etc. is a constant concern throughout the clinical trial phases. However, patient retention through engagement is also a key factor — and one that is often overlooked. Patient dropout rates for pharmaceutical clinical trials are estimated to range between 15 to 40 percent of enrolled participants, depending on the trial phase.

76. Phase I Clinical Supply Landscape: Trends, Demarcation And Security 8/30/2016

    The core addressable early phase market is USD 11.9 billion growing with a CAGR of 2 – 3 percent. Early-phase trials are outsourced at greater than 60 percent by pharma, as the trials are costly and small in number. The supply market for early phase is comprised by CROs, research centers, and academic institutes. The market size that is comprised by the CROs is estimated to be around USD 8 billion, which is about 67 percent of the early phase market.