Investigative Sites

Pacing obesity trial enrollment, anchoring eligibility to stable real-world therapies, and building site and physician relationships improve retention and data quality more than aggressive recruitment or restrictive exclusion criteria do.

In Episode 3 of The Human Side of Clinical Trials, hosts Brian S. McGowan, PhD, FACEHP, chief learning officer and co-founder of ArcheMedX, Inc., and Kelly Ritch, chief operating officer of ArcheMedX, Inc., speak with Jason Riis, PhD, CEO and chief behavioral scientist at Behavioralize, about why a well-written protocol doesn’t always translate into consistent execution, and how designing for the way people actually think and learn can reduce site burden and the need for costly unlearning.

Site training effectiveness depends on readiness at first-patient-in, requiring learning-science design principles around performance focus, cognitive load reduction, progressive sequencing, and spaced retrieval practice rather than training completion metrics or content volume.

In this Q&A, Andrea Valente, CEO of uMotif, discusses what it takes to build genuine trust between patients and sites, why making technology easier to use isn't the same as making patient-site interaction more effective, and where the industry is still falling short in its push toward patient-centered trial design.

Cell and gene therapy access expands into community care settings only when operational coordination, site readiness, and supply chain standardization become first-order priorities equivalent to manufacturing capacity, requiring standardized processes, digital integration, and distributed logistics networks.

In this episode of Beyond Compliance, Otis Johnson, PhD, MPA, founder and principal consultant at Vantix Operations, speaks with Cecilia Xi, PhD, VP of clinical and scientific affairs at Vivalink, about why defensible trial data depends on traceability, platform ownership, and device strategy long after a study ends.

Decentralized trial models have demonstrated real gains in enrollment performance and patient access, but operational switching costs, fragmented technology stacks, and unresolved gaps in the patient-site relationship raise a question the industry has been slow to confront directly.

In a video interview prior to the 2026 DPHARM conference, Andrea Valente, CEO of uMotif, shares what she expects to be at the center of the conversation—from building trust between patients and sites to where AI may and may not have a role in that relationship.

In this Q&A, John Worden, chief commercial officer at Javara, discusses why clinical trial recruitment has remained stubbornly one-size-fits-all, how AI can identify patients at scale without displacing the clinician relationships that drive trust, and what care-integrated research engagement needs to look like for health systems, sponsors, and sites.

This pilot episode of The Human Side of Clinical Trials introduces a framework from Brian S. McGowan, PhD, FACEHP, chief learning officer and co-founder of ArcheMedX, Inc., exploring why operational failures in clinical trials often trace back to gaps in human readiness rather than process design alone.

Static budgeting models and one-size-fits-all fair market value approaches create visibility gaps around inflation and true site costs, but regional frameworks, standardized costing toolkits, and accountability metrics can rebuild trust and replace defensive negotiations with transparency.

Agentic AI is arriving in clinical operations with genuine capability to absorb administrative work, but the organizations that will realize lasting value are those willing to redesign accountability structures, financial workflows, and operating models before deploying the tools on top of them.

In this video interview, Patrick Mizer, chief technology officer at Ledger Run, addresses the reality that 80% of sites operate on six months or less of cash—and explains why growing investment in agentic AI and workflow modernization signals that the industry is starting to treat payment infrastructure as the priority it deserves.

In this video interview, Patrick Mizer, chief technology officer at Ledger Run, explains how unpredictable payments erode site relationships over time—and why operational excellence in payments is becoming increasingly important to landing and retaining the best investigative sites.

In this video interview, Patrick Mizer, chief technology officer at Ledger Run, describes how agentic AI is being applied to invoice processing—one of the most labor-intensive bottlenecks in site payments—and what meaningful improvement actually looks like in practice.

In this video interview, Patrick Mizer, chief technology officer at Ledger Run, traces the fragmented contracts, outdated benchmarks, and disconnected systems behind payment inconsistency—and explains why the industry has historically accepted the complexity rather than addressed it.

In this video interview, Patrick Mizer, chief technology officer at Ledger Run, explains how the shift from competing for patients to competing for high-performing sites has made payment reliability an operational brand—and a real factor in which sponsors get prioritized.

In this video interview, Amber Hill, PhD, founder and CEO of Research Grid, outlines the three conditions required for AI-driven trial acceleration to work at scale: broad AI literacy, shared boundaries around where it can be applied safely, and incremental adoption of purpose-built tools across the entire ecosystem.

In this video interview, Amber Hill, PhD, founder and CEO of Research Grid, explains why most trial failures are fundamentally administrative problems—and why patient sourcing, site feasibility, and back-office data capture are where AI delivers the fastest and most meaningful wins.

Faster, more efficient clinical trials depend on structural alignment in how sponsors, CROs, and research sites plan and execute studies together.

Clinical research associates are evolving from compliance-focused manual monitors to data-enabled strategic site partners, but organizations need analytics training, clear operating models, and active change management to make the shift stick.

From point-of-care sample collection to real-world data curation, wearable device integration, and continuous review infrastructure, data quality is not a single problem in clinical trials—it is a layered challenge that manifests differently at every stage of development and demands a different set of solutions at each one.

In this episode of Beyond Compliance, Otis Johnson, PhD, MPA, founder and principal consultant at Vantix Operations, speaks with Joseph Kim, Chief Strategy Officer at ProofPilot, and Lauren Briggs, Chief Customer Officer at ProofPilot, about why completing training is not the same as being prepared to execute a protocol.