Managing clinical trials in today’s landscape can be extremely challenging. Several roadblocks can come in the way of successful product development, starting from lack of transparency and visibility into trial costs to hindrance due to organizational and geographical boundaries, non-standardized processes to disparate systems, and so on.
Thus, Clinical Trial Management System or CTMS has been used by sponsors to gain insights into the data, track progress, and possibilities. For years, CTMS has played a pivotal role in clinical program and project management, study management, trial and site planning, investigator management, budget management, and more.
As the pandemic started to rage the world, the requirement of a centralized portal has become the need of the hour for patients, sponsors, CROs, and Sites to promote collaboration and communicate with one another efficiently. The crisis meant following strict social distancing guidelines, less availability of patients in the sites, and the urgency to re-look into how sites interact with patients to ensure everyone’s safety. Hence, it is no surprise that overnight the need for an integrated CTMS with a centralized portal became a top priority for everyone.
How centralized portals can improve efficiency and promote collaboration
In a clinical trial, if anyone is the king, it is data. Irrespective of the therapy and its effectiveness, FDA approval depends mostly on clean and reliable data. The success or the failure of the clinical trial depends mainly on the data and how it gets transmitted from one stakeholder to another. Not just the transmission of data is essential, but how the information is then gathered, analyzed, and viewed in real-time by both the sponsor and the site matters a lot. Having a centralized portal integrated into systems like EDC makes communication and flow of data easier between the concerned stakeholders. For example, the solution developed by Cloudbyz helps to consolidate data in real-time, making it easier for users to manage virtual clinical trial operations.
Centralized portals and their benefits
– Centralized portals have come as a big aid for virtual clinical trials amidst the pandemic. A centralized portal means a single login is enough to access all the information and, at the same time, manage patient recruitment, track the budgets, payments, and regulatory reporting at the same time.
– Real-time collaboration with a centralized system means one can access data at any point in time. A sponsor can access the data while having a meeting with the internal team. One doesn’t need to wait for a week or so to access the reports.
– Today, data is pouring in from all sources, and researches can access them in fragments. But when we have a solution in hand that has a single portal with a centralized system, different stakeholders can collaborate in real-time. It also means that with one login, a researcher can have complete access to all the data at one go. In short, the researcher can focus more on the study and analyzing the data and less time in aggregating and finding the data. A centralized portal thus accelerates the whole process while prioritizing patient experience.
– Having a centralized portal also helps in scalability. Trials that were once done with a handful of patients can now accommodate thousands of patients for trials conducted in different therapeutic centers irrespective of their geographical borders.
– A centralized portal can also help identify missing data, data outliers, or any unexpected protocol deviation that researchers, CROs, and sponsors can communicate effectively.
– It can also help in analyzing site characteristics and communicate the performance metrics without any delay.
– It comes handy in reporting to the sites if there is any significant error in data collection.
An integrated CTMS is our need for the hour in the pandemic-hit world. When sponsors and researchers across the globe are working tirelessly to combat the virus, an integrated CTMS will prioritize communication between patients, sponsors, CROs, and sites, and drive the future of clinical research.