2026 SCRS Global Site Solutions Summit: What's a Mistake Sponsors or CROs Make When Rolling Out New Trial Technology?

Lauren Briggs, chief customer officer, ProofPilot, identifies the most common mistake sponsors and CROs make as treating a technology rollout as a simple deployment rather than a true change management effort.

She argues that adopting any new tool inherently requires effort, since it disrupts established day-to-day habits, which is why ProofPilot stays hands-on from the start through the first 90 days and beyond, attending investigator meetings and site initiation visits where possible and focusing heavily on initial training so sites understand the actual value a platform brings to their workflow. Briggs also points to ProofPilot’s site advisory board as a differentiator, noting that sites directly influence product direction and new functionality, ensuring development genuinely serves site workflows rather than working against them, with that value then fed back to users on the platform.

Looking at the bigger picture, Briggs says she hopes sponsors, CROs, and sites leave this year’s SCRS Summit rethinking how they evaluate trial technology altogether, moving beyond individual feature checklists to consider the overall value and efficiency a platform brings to a site’s real day-to-day workflow.

She frames this as understanding what sites actually need in order to spend the most time possible with patients. Reflecting broader themes she heard throughout the conference, Briggs emphasizes the opportunity to consolidate the scattered, disparate tools sites currently juggle into a single, centralized place, ultimately keeping the focus on the patient and making sites’ daily operations meaningfully more efficient.