Don't Underestimate the Value of the Human Touch in Clinical Trials: Mobile Research Nurses Make a Critical Difference in Decentralized Trials, Whether Employed Exclusively or in Conjunction with Latest Technology
With innovations in wearables, digital monitors and video capabilities, technology can play a role in efficiently capturing data in decentralized clinical trials. Technology alone often is not enough, however, especially considering the diverse and vulnerable populations who participate in clinical trials. Human intervention by properly trained medical professionals such as mobile research nurses is key to ensuring data consistency and integrity as well as protocol compliance. Given the bond that often forms between patients and their caregivers, mobile research nurses also can help improve patient retention.
In today’s ACT Brief, we examine how capturing friction in real time can reveal site burden, how OpenAI and Mistral compare on clinical trial matching, and how Boehringer Ingelheim is licensing early-stage oncology programs from SBP Group.
Mistral and OpenAI produced identical overall eligibility labels across 200 synthetic patient-study assessments, with criterion-level disagreements concentrated in inclusion criteria where models switch between “Uncertain” and “Not included” when records lack sufficient evidence, so model choice should be driven by deployment architecture, control, and cost rather than assumed interchangeability.
In Episode 4 of The Human Side of Clinical Trials, host Brian S. McGowan, PhD, FACEHP, chief learning officer and co-founder of ArcheMedX, Inc., speaks with Jason Riis, PhD, CEO and chief behavioral scientist at Behavioralize, about how capturing friction closer to the moment it happens can reveal unclear instructions, technology friction, and workarounds that retrospective surveys and debriefs tend to miss.
In today’s ACT Brief, we examine why community research needs lasting financing and infrastructure, how electronic outcome tools can strengthen neuroscience endpoints, and how Teva is licensing two biosimilars from Samsung Bioepis.
Neuroscience trials struggle to show benefit because symptoms are subjective and variable, and eCOA strengthens dossiers by standardizing ClinRO administration, capturing outcomes in real time to reduce recall bias, and adding patient and caregiver perspectives that clinician scales miss.
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.
In today’s ACT Brief, we examine what changes when AI is embedded across clinical operations, why faster trial data isn’t yet producing faster decisions, and how FDA granted accelerated approval to a therapy for a rare airway disease.
Data capture is no longer the bottleneck, and whether the lag between a signal and a decision shrinks depends on signal design, AI governance, and vendor orchestration.