Orlando Agrippa, CEO of Sanius Health, talks the importance of digital innovation in optimising clinical trials.
I have often highlighted this to clinical, industry, and CRO colleagues – maybe to anyone who would listen. Clinical trials are important.
They are harder and more expensive to do, and finding patients to participate can be tough.
This means that trials take longer to start and longer to complete and report, with the utility and value of results often diminishing by the time of publication – a situation that is wholly unfavourable to all involved.
Risk-based monitoring (RBM) is a modern approach to clinical trials, shifting from the traditional frequent, on-site monitoring toward a more targeted and flexible strategy.
Critically, RBM is designed to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of trials while still maintaining data integrity and patient safety.
With an increase in its adoption over recent years in light of the introduction of new regulatory requirements, the emergence of supportive technologies, and the decentralisation of clinical trials, there is a key question for the multi-disciplinary teams responsible for these trials: how can we best apply technology and innovative approaches to enhance success and reshape the trial landscape?
Tackling the Issue of Patient Matching and Recruitment in Clinical Trials
Digital ecosystems, utilised well, have the potential to arm teams conducting clinical trials with solutions that target the key issues around data access and patient recruitment at a retrospective and prospective level.
Such technology provides the ability to create integrated pools of patient data across sites, sources, and disease areas, from which the critical inclusion and exclusion criteria can be matched for trial cohorts.
With this, teams are equipped not only with the ability to drive recruitment of the right patients during study set-up, but also to create “trial-like” external comparator arms when contextualising existing output.
Beyond the data, critical parts of our day-to-day span from driving engagement with the clinical teams and treatment sites that support the signposting of patients to potential studies of relevance, to engagement with patients and patient organisations themselves.
Bridging the gap between patients, research, and a better understanding of their disease is a core part of our ongoing work, and a vital component in any approach to boosting recruitment for clinical trials.
