Avoca Quality Consortium Expands Membership to Product and Services Providers

The Avoca Quality Consortium announced its key initiatives for 2014, with a significant move to a change in its membership. That is it will offer Associate Consortium
Membership to companies that provide products and services in support of clinical development. This addresses what the Consortium believes will foster increased industry collaboration.

Other initiatives include:

• Develop a new standard for prequalification for niche providers. By facilitating the sharing of information, AQC hopes to increase efficiency and reduce the costs associated with prequalification.
• Continue AQC’s efforts to expand the Consortium’s resources and tools for leading practices for quality oversight: focus will be placed on developing principles and tools for Quality by Design and Risk Management.
• Conduct a benchmarking research effort to measure business practices and the status of quality management practices to gauge whether there has been improvement or decline in quality over the past two years.
  
• Kick-off a new collaboration with The Society of Clinical Research Sites (SCRS) to gather sites’ feedback and opinions about quality management practices and sites’ perceptions of sponsors and CROs.
• Launch an educational webinar series focused on quality management practices.

The Consoritum was founded in 2012 as an opportunity to bring sponsors and CROs together to accelerate the development of best practices and industry standards for proactive quality management. The Avoca Quality Consortium is led by The Avoca Group, Inc., a Princeton-based consulting firm.

Read the full release here.