Clinical trials are growing increasingly complex, which means they’re likely to cost more and take up a lot of time for professionals and patients alike. The average clinical phase duration of drug development is now estimated at 6.8 years, a 15% increase over levels observed 10 years ago.
Technological advances and the inclusion of more digital automation offer the opportunity for efficiencies in clinical trials. How can the world of medicine access and clinical studies be benefited by technology that will make it easier for patients, professionals and trials themselves to deliver a faster and more efficient method of testing?
Faster Startup Times
When implementing a clinical trial, the ability to streamline the start-up process as much as possible offers opportunities to save costs and ultimately, reduce time to submission of trial data. At this critical stage there are many different factors at play including country selection and enrolment of subjects, meaning many companies are looking to optimise this process.
Reducing start-up times can involve automated solutions such as web-based tools accessed through mobile technology. These can be harnessed to allow clinical trials professionals to organise tasks, track supply, and guide team members through regulatory requirements to speed up the start-up process. Cloud-based platforms are also now more widely used in order to make data more easily accessible and faster to work with, helping clinical trials to start-up quicker and more efficiently.
Reducing Costs
Due to the increasing size and timeline of clinical trials in recent years, more data is being collected and analysed than ever before. This means that as well as combating increasing complexity, it’s also becoming an ever-increasing priority for companies to reduce costs. Slower manual data capture methods such as spreadsheets make it difficult to rein in costs or reduce time constraints.
Electronic Data Capture (EDC) systems can help reduce costs during the clinical trials process through reducing workload as well as ensuring data is more accurately collected and shared. This service can often be made bespoke to the trial, with companies in turn more likely to create savings by lessening need for site monitoring as well as less time spent correcting errors.
