Relationship-Centric Technology: Improving the Human Experience for Better Engagement

One of the most undervalued uses of technology, perhaps especially so in clinical development, is to bring people closer together. Relationship-centric technology presents a sizable emerging opportunity for sponsors to improve the performance of clinical development.

During a clinical trial, serious communications between people of diverse backgrounds - patients, investigators, and specialists at sponsors and CROs - do not always conclude ideally. For example, patients may consent to participation without fully understanding the required procedures or schedule of visits, only to drop out when their trust and comfort with their investigator degrades. Clever use of technology can help bridge perspectives, prevent misunderstandings, and remove distractions from the personal relationships that are the bedrock of a trial.

In fact, while many recent technological innovations aim to streamline repetitive tasks, gaining efficiency and quality data are only the beginning. We may find that broadening our expectations of technology will uncover new opportunities to transform the interpersonal relationships at the core of any trial’s success. When people work better together, we can gain more than just efficiency.

Many areas for improvement exist within relationships in the clinical research process and a number of related “relationship-centric” technologies are gaining traction today. While “false dawns” of software that “simplified workflows” to improve a clinical trial’s quality have appeared previously, recent adoption of clever designs and smarter algorithms that report trends instead of noise has led myself and colleagues to believe a new standard for clinical operations is emerging.

Lifting burdens to refocus site staff

The obvious target for applying a relationship-centric expectation for technology’s role is between patient and investigator.

Site staff, who balance day-to-day patient care alongside collection clinical trial data, receive a dizzying number of resources and tools for a trial. These may include a web portal for enrollment, another for recording clinical data, and yet one more for payments. Digital innovations that once “streamlined” paper-based processes have piled up to become a small mountain of logins and bookmarks. Parsing these websites is a common complaint for investigators, who report struggling to find time for trial tasks (e.g., entering visit data, responding to reconciliation queries) amid the constant demands of practicing medicine. Most sites house more than one clinical trial, thus multiplying the resources.

A benefit clearly exists from consolidating a trial’s myriad websites into one destination with one login. Indeed, we’ve observed many sponsors adopt single sign-on web portals. These portals resolve an impediment not only to productivity, but also a genuine investigator frustration. Based on our experience and discussion with other vendors, these portals increase investigator satisfaction, lead to sites delivering better quality data, and also motivate good sites in conducting additional clinical trials with that sponsor again.

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