The Future of Remote Trials
ACT's Editor-in-Chief, Lisa Henderson, assesses the sustainability of remote trials.
Let’s take a short vocabulary quiz. Full in-person, hybrid, virtual, remote, synchronous, asynchronous are terms used for, a) descriptions of clinical trials, b) types of cars, c) descriptions of learning models for schools during COVID-19. The answer is “c,” but the comparison I was going for is clearly trial design or type of site model. I left out decentralization because that would have been a huge giveaway, and I haven’t seen that term used yet on any school K-college curriculum. While I struggled with understanding synchronous and asynchronous as the two forms of online learning in the beginning, I have it down now. There has been a lot of discussion in clinical trials about the difference between virtual and remote, and I think that has been cleared up also. So let’s dive into the future of hybrid, decentralized, and remote trials.
According to a recent report from Frost & Sullivan,
The report also suggested that adoption of hybrid trials by CROs could increase their growth opportunities by enabling uninterrupted trials and cost savings of 15% to 20%; by focusing on long-term collaborations that offer substantial cost advantages with 8% to 13% savings across different trial phases; by leveraging new technologies, such as risk-based monitoring, eConsent, wearables, and telemedicine patient visits; and implementing direct-to-patient model clinical trial supplies
As we will explore in our
While I’m a supporter of remote and hybrid trials to support patients’ needs and expansion of availability of trials to more people, I have questions about the future of the same for long-time learning purposes. For the clinical research enterprise, the pandemic is bringing great innovation more quickly to an industry willing to move forward with purpose.
Lisa Henderson is Editor-in-Chief of Applied Clinical Trials. She can be reached at
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