Sponsors and stakeholders are increasingly exploring new ways of enhancing clinical trials. They’re searching for fast recruitment techniques, smarter ways of engaging patients, and economical management methods. With the fast-paced technology used by CROs like Veristat, virtual clinical trial design is replacing the traditional models.
But how are virtual trials better than their traditional counterparts? Do they streamline clinical trial planning and management? Let’s compare the two under the following parameters and find out the truth.
Trial Continuity
We live in a world where the future remains unknown to everyone. In the case where a disruption interferes with your trial, which clinical model remains efficient? When the pandemic struck the world, on-site trials were impossible to carry out due to social distancing protocols and other restrictions. On the other hand, virtual trials could proceed since everything got done remotely through patient monitoring devices and data-driven tools like Social media. Based on this, virtual trials seem to be more resilient than onsite (traditional) models.
Cost Reduction
Clinical research can be a costly project that requires years to complete. So, between a virtual and a traditional trial model, which one is less expensive and why? Virtual research is cheaper than a traditional one. While the latter experiences more drop rates due to frequent and cumbersome visits to the site, the former reduces the trial’s cost in several ways. For instance, they have patient recruitment fast and minimum delays during the launching. Also, virtual trials have reduced trial drop-out rates with minimum expenditure on on-site management. Finally, they use streamlined patient visits with zero or minimum visits to the site
Patient Engagement
In clinical trials, recruiting patients is one thing, while retaining them is another. Stakeholders, sponsors, and other players in clinical trials are struggling to maintain a high enrollment rate as well as patient retention. While traditional trials offer fair patient retention, virtual models are excellent in this area. Most patients appreciate remote participation because it’s convenient — no frequent site visits accompanied by transportation costs. On top of that, there is no waiting in lines for data collection due to hi-tech monitoring devices. Generally, virtual trials engage the patients more than traditional ones since they can participate from the comfort of their homes. This is more likely to reduce the drop-out rate in your trial.
Research Monitoring
Traditional clinical research has a regular schedule for patients checking in. While regularly collecting results can drive success to the trial, traditional models can be victims of missing data points between two patient checkup dates. On the other hand, a virtual clinical trial uses powerful technologies to monitor patients in real-time. This enables capturing research data with the highest accuracy level, thus reducing the trial’s duration significantly than expected. That shows that a virtual clinical trial offers superb research monitoring, making it better than a traditional one.
Remote clinical trials are better than onsite trials. But they have some disadvantages like elderly people and children may do better with physical monitoring than with the devices used in remote trials. Also, remote trials may face issues with patients adhering to the participation objectives, that’s considering people’s lifestyles and discipline levels are different
