Feature|Articles|November 2, 2026

From Signal to Action: Why Faster Trial Data Isn’t Producing Faster Decisions

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.

Clinical trials have never captured data as quickly as they do now. In a recent contributed article on Applied Clinical Trials, Amir Malka and Philip McCrea, chief executives of Bioforum The Data Masters and Viedoc, pointed to electronic data capture (EDC), electronic clinical outcome assessments, wearables, central laboratories, imaging, and decentralized sources, along with other data streams that barely existed a decade ago. Analytics are speeding up too, they noted, as artificial intelligence (AI) and automation make it possible to interrogate data while a study is still running.¹

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