Author: MRN
For those unable to attend OCT Europe, which was hosted in Barcelona, Spain, we wouldn’t want to leave you in the dark – just as those of us attending were the day before the conference started. Having just arrived in Barcelona on the 28th, the team headed to the hotel to get our booth set-up and ready for the two busy days ahead. Shortly after, the power was out – in one of the biggest power outages in Europe in the last 20-years! However, the organizers of the event were brilliant – providing reassurance and support where needed. And it didn’t stop the event – which went off without a hitch.
It became increasingly clear throughout the conference that patient-centricity was ultimately the core topic in the front of everyone’s mind. But not just patient-centricity itself as an idea – there is a clear shift towards taking action as opposed to just discussing this important approach to trial design.
The call came from across sectors and solution-providers – patients need to be a part of every aspect of the trial. Whether you are considering your regulatory strategy or what tech to use, you must consider to what extent this will affect the patient.
There were multiple examples of how much participation burden patients experience – from a lack of education around trial involvement, the stressors of having to input data into multiple apps/platforms, lack of communication between sites and patients, to the more common themes of distance to sites, cumbersome and lengthy site visits, and a lack of flexibility.
While there is much talk around patient-centricity, there remains slow uptake of the actual implementation of solutions that can help trial and protocol design become patient-centric.
From our many discussions, both formally and informally, it became clear that there is a lack of understanding around the long-term benefits of decentralized clinical trial (DCT) patient-centric solutions. Sponsors and traditional sites have not necessarily been educated enough to look past the short-term pains such as costs for feasibility studies and implementation processes in order to see the long-term gains these solutions offer not just them, but also the patients and sites.
Based on our discussions and observations at OCT EU, is that one of the biggest gains that Sponsors and sites are not seeing in the short-term is “time”. They are seeing the short-term financial and time-related costs to include these solutions in their studies but what they are failing to recognize is that these costs are then paid back (and then some) in the long-term.
What we have taken away from OCT EU is that we need to continue to highlight the long-term benefits to the solutions that we offer. All of MRN’s solutions can offer Sponsors, patients and sites the ultimate benefit – time back. By bringing trials into patients’ communities, either through community sites & services or Home Trial Support (HTS), our solutions do the following:
- Accelerate patient recruitment and maintain engagement, ensuring trials meet their goals and deadlines.
- Minimize the time patients spend traveling to and from sites, as well as the time spend at site.
- Increase the amount of time sites have by reducing their workload.
OCT EU has highlighted the continuous need to educate Sponsors, sites and patients in order to help bring more trials to more patients while reducing the burdens on sites and patients and enabling sponsors to get their life-changing therapies to market, faster. To read more on the return on investment of these types of solutions, check out: How To Realize The Value of Patient-centric Solutions.