2025 SCRS Global Site Solutions Summit: How Technology Partners Can Simplify Site Workflows and Training

In a video interview with Applied Clinical Trials ahead of the 2025 SCRS Global Site Solutions Summit, Steve Rosenberg, CEO, uMotif, discussed the challenges sites face in implementing eClinical technologies like eCOA, eConsent, and ePRO. He highlighted the burden on sites, which are not equipped to handle tech support, and emphasized the need for multilingual support and direct patient-site relationships. Vendors are aiming to simplify site management by providing a single sign-on for various systems and dashboards. Rosenberg also advocated for sponsors to invest in site technology to reduce administrative overhead. He concluded by exploring the importance of integrating technology training with protocol training to streamline study startup and reduce training time.

ACT: How can technology partners support sites in managing multiple overlapping digital systems while still maintaining protocol compliance and data quality?

Rosenberg: They're overwhelmed. If you go back 10 years, or 15 years, when I was doing EDC, they were overwhelmed by the all the different laptops and passwords and systems. When you compare that to today, that was trivial, it wasn't very complicated. Now it's much more complicated because there's a lot of different technologies they're being asked to use.

As a vendor, what we try to do is, we try to give them a single place to sign on, a catalog of all the systems that they need to use, whether there are systems or somebody else's, but an easier way to navigate between the systems, maintaining context, also trying to provide dashboards that are also agnostic across trials that they could look at and see what they have to do on that day. Now there are companies out there that are trying to sell that stuff directly to the sites. We have stuff like that to do that, and what we try to do is we try to get the sponsors to invest in the sites, to help them use this technology because, again, the sites are not set up to buy software and install software, and they're just not set up as big IT like some of them are—Cleveland Clinic, Dana Farber, they have pretty big departments, but there's not enough of those to enroll the patients, so you really have to look at and have a good degree of empathy for what the sites go through on a daily basis, and give them an experience that makes a technology more invisible to them.

ACT: With growing pressure to streamline study startup, what role should eClinical technology providers play in reducing training time and administrative overhead for site staff?

Rosenberg: What's starting to happen again is investigator meetings are coming back. We actually attended one in Boston and one in London for the same study that we're running, but the training is taking different formats. Some of the training is done electronically. You still have to keep track of who's trained, because in many trainings, you can't access an instrument until you've successfully had the training, but again, the technology of supplying the training has to be interesting, and alongside the training that goes through in the protocol. Every site that signs up to do a clinical trial gets some kind of training for the protocol, and that's usually science. What are we trying to prove? What does a molecule do? What kind of safety things to look out for? How do you consent the patient? There's all that information that the sites need on the protocol. What you want to do is piggyback the technology training onto that, to not add a whole other crazy sector. You also want to be able to have your software, so if they have a question, there's someplace in the software that they can go to and say, “Help me,” and it gives you contextual help right away, or they have a phone number they can call right away that speaks their language, that helps them. That's what the vendors can do, is just to make that more seamless and flowing with the general education that they need to conduct a clinical trial.