Why Every Clinical Trial Needs Patient Centricity
September 12, 2023
Everyone has been asked at some point to fill out a lengthy questionnaire at a doctor’s office. Whether on paper or online, these questionnaires can be irritating to get through, but they’re often mandatory, so we push through them, glad they only take a small amount of our time.
But what if you’re a patient who’s taking part in a clinical trial? The amount and frequency of data being collected are magnified, and suddenly every annoyance of that lengthy questionnaire feels like a bigger stumbling block. If the trial’s design is poor or the setup unwieldy, it will take a long time to get through something that you aren’t required to complete. Maybe you’ll rush through, giving incomplete answers, or maybe you just won’t finish it. For the people running the trial, this means that trying to gather and understand the data to drive better outcomes in treatment becomes extremely challenging.
This brief example illustrates why patient centricity is the key to successful clinical trials. Patient centricity is, in its simplest definition, exactly what it sounds like: the centering of the patient in every aspect. In other words,
the patient’s wants, needs, and preferences should drive the decisions made to build clinical trials.
This should be at the heart of every organization’s plan, and in order to do it effectively, you have to really know your patients.
At Studion, we understand this, which is how we’ve successfully met our past clients’ challenges through prioritizing patient centricity. Our clinical trial expertise in understanding patient engagement, plus our extensive experience with technology allows us to understand when and how to ask patients questions in a way that gets the most responses. We always aim at getting better compliance from patients in order to get the highest quality and most complete data possible. We align your goals, the technology, and the patients’ needs, from design through delivery. We build in accessibility and prize ease of use and engaging presentation so that patients are willing and even eager to return to their study.
If we can reduce the friction between the needs of the science and the protocols and the clinical trial design, and if we can empower life sciences organizations to better define the overall patient experience, the result would be a standard digital design that could improve the partner selection process and the overall implementation timeline.
Imagine a scenario where the clinical protocol is written alongside the digital protocol, resulting in the best science and the best operational designs to maximize patient engagement. That scenario would very likely achieve better, more meaningful outcomes. At Studion, this is what we want for every clinical trial because we believe that healthy, empowered people lead to a better world.