Feature|Articles|November 3, 2026

Beyond the Modernization Act: What It Takes to Make Community Research Infrastructure Permanent

Community participation gaps look less like a question of patient willingness and more like a financing and infrastructure problem that no single bill has yet solved.

Community participation in clinical research is often framed as a question of whether patients are willing, but recent Applied Clinical Trials interviews and policy developments point to a different diagnosis. The barriers sit in how patients are supported, how sites are burdened, and how research capacity is funded, and no single bill has resolved all three.

Related to this article

© photon_photo - © photon_photo - stock.adobe.com
Standardized measurement across five oncology centers found that clinical research coordinators rated eSource-enabled workflows positively (Overall Mean Satisfaction 5.79 of 7), with reduced manual entry and electronic data transfer earning strong marks, while perceived reduction in sponsor and monitor queries lagged as the one domain below threshold.
What Needs to Happen Beyond the Clinical Trial Modernization Act
In this video interview, Kent Thoelke, CEO of Paradigm Health, calls for safe harbor protections, CMS reimbursement safeguards, and funding mechanisms modeled on EHR meaningful use to help community and rural institutions participate in research on par with academic centers.
Building AI Assistants Clinical Trial Teams Can Trust: Q&A with E.K. Koh, Suvoda
In this Q&A, E.K. Koh, chief product officer at Suvoda, discusses what separates a trustworthy AI assistant from one that adds risk, why curated clinical knowledge matters more than general-purpose flexibility, and what safeguards must be in place when assistants move from answering questions to taking actions in clinical trial systems.