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

Today more and more companies are investing in better data practices. Organizations are now opting to invest in a data center consolidation with providers like CentricsIT to keep their data all in one place and secure. Today data consolidation is pretty essential to the modern marketing ecosystem. You can easily combine your CRM, Advertising, email, web performance, and other relevant intelligence all in one place.

With that in mind, what are the best data consolidation practices that will help you save money and time? Here are some of the practices that will save you a lot during your data center migration.

Start with the most valuable data

Data consolidation can be a big deal, especially with different audiences, marketing channels, and campaigns on enterprise-level businesses. It might take a while to achieve complete data consolidation, so experts advise starting with data sets that provide the most valuable insights.

Reduce your dependence on “walled gardens.”

Having successful data consolidation allows you to have general control over your audience data. However, this becomes hard, especially in ‘walled gardens’ data environment.  Websites such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon use a great deal of third-party data to gather data for their marketing campaigns. But, you don’t own the data; hence you cannot consolidate it or control it. While most companies can’t stop using Facebook and Google ads, you can opt to reduce your over-reliance on such platforms. Use your technology to track your users to make it easier for you to control, unify and analyze your audience data.

Ensure consistency in data types

Data types must be consistent across all platforms. You will find that different platforms will illustrate and categorize data in contrast. You do not want to discover this once you have consolidated your data. A good example is when one uses a different data format from the other or one tool denotes currency different from the other. So you have to ensure that your tools adapt the different data types before transferring rather than fixing it after you have transferred it.

Ensure data completeness

It is pretty easy to run into issues if you are transferring data that is not complete. Remember that different tools use different ways to sort and categorize consumer data. If you do not have complete information about your customers and leads, you will quickly get issues in the future. A good example is when a tool identifies your customers by their names and another identifies them by their email addresses. If you transfer data with the email addresses missing, the tool will not categorize and distinguish those leads properly.

There are many advantages of data consolidations, but there is also a lot of room for errors. You have to be very careful with how you plan to undertake your data consolidation. You need to ensure that you consolidate your data accurately, reduce the time you invest while maximizing the value for your marketing and sales strategy.