In the clinical trial space, it's critical for teams to work together to achieve results faster. Patients depend on therapies developed during clinical trials to improve their health or even save their lives. Which means they are relying on the teams behind those trials — the sites and sponsors — to effectively deliver those therapies.
What if those separate study teams, those site and sponsor teams, were to reconfigure the way they collaborate together so that they could view themselves as one study team? What if they had an easy way of collaborating, using technology, to ensure their team was actually working together toward a common goal to make a difference in their therapeutic areas?
That’s the thinking behind OneStudyTeam, which is part of the Reify Health family. OneStudyTeam provides a cloud-based platform, StudyTeam, to accelerate the development of new and lifesaving therapies. StudyTeam brings research site workflows online and enables sites, sponsors, and other key stakeholders to work together more effectively using common technology.
In 2015, we saw that those stakeholders who were all working together toward a common goal (i.e., assessing whether or not a potential new therapy is safe and effective) were doing their work in silos. However, to predictably enroll clinical trials and deliver a high-quality patient experience, we would need technology to connect the complex workflows of research sites, sponsors, patients, and other key players and allow for more seamless collaboration. We started by connecting sites and sponsors.
We created a new product model that allowed sites and sponsors to work together on a common platform (this sounds obvious and simple, but is really hard to do!), and we applied this new model directly to clinical trial enrollment. We helped sites more effectively pre-screen and enroll their studies.
Simultaneously, sponsors were connected to sites' workflows for the first time, allowing sites to keep sponsors informed about trial enrollment with unprecedented real-time clarity and to save time doing it. Sponsors gained visibility into the inputs that dictated how a trial would enroll and could better manage enrollment to keep it on track.
Using StudyTeam, sites are empowered to share de-identified patient data with sponsors in real time. This allows sponsors to identify and quickly implement changes that can support sites in meeting their enrollment goals. For example, sponsors can identify pre-screen failure patterns across sites during a trial and consider updating inclusion and exclusion (I/E) criteria to allow more patients to enroll. Without a centralized, digital platform, that collaboration would be hindered by paper forms and Excel spreadsheets — traditional ways of sharing information.
Our industry needed a connected technology foundation that allowed for more functionality to be added without creating significantly more work –– a technology foundation that integrated with other solutions seamlessly, so teams can focus on doing work and not on tracking more logins and constantly relearning the multitude of technology systems required for each clinical trial.
We gave our platform a name that reinforced its more fundamental purpose — to bring the workflows of key clinical trial stakeholders (together, the “study team”) onto a common platform and help them work together as one. Already, we have seen enrollment rates shift for the better. On average, StudyTeam customers complete patient enrollment six weeks faster per trial across their portfolios.
Creating our technology platform showed us and the industry what was possible when clinical trial stakeholders collaborate on a common technology platform. But critically, this was always just the first step on a much longer journey.
As a technology company, and as a part of the one study team that includes sites, sponsors, and recruitment vendors, we are constantly innovating to solve challenges in the clinical trial space. How do we raise more awareness of actively enrolling clinical trials for patients and physicians? How do we ensure the right patients get through enrollment even faster? And how do we continue to build easy methods of collaboration between sites and sponsors?
We are not alone in this work. Our concept of one study team that collaborates and shares insights through technology can be applied to any clinical trial around the world. Sponsors, sites, patients, technology vendors, regulatory agencies — all these stakeholders must work together toward a common goal of bringing new therapies to patients.
