Oversight boards and committees play a critical role in ensuring the safety and efficacy of clinical trials. Given this responsibility, clinical trial oversight boards must function at peak performance. The more efficient the day-to-day operations of these boards, the more likely the study will be successfully completed on time and under budget. In this blog post, we will discuss four methods for ensuring your oversight boards can execute its duties more efficiently.
Improve Your Oversight Committee's Operational Efficiency With These Four Best Practices
Best Practice 1: Ensure Your Board Is All On The Same Page
An effective oversight board or committee is one that has a mix of medical and scientific expertise, as well as experience in clinical research. Ensuring that you have the right combination of skills around the table will help you accomplish more during internal meetings and reduce the need to bring in outside support to fill a skill gap.
All members should have a thorough understanding of the study protocol and be up to date on any changes that have been made. They should also be able to have open, frank discussions about the study without feeling like they are being judged.
Honest communication is key to identifying and resolving potential issues before they can negatively affect the clinical trial.
Best Practice 2: Establish A Digital Homebase
If you want to improve the operational efficiency of your oversight board, it’s time to think beyond Dropbox files and shared Google or Microsoft Drives. Look instead for a central, shared, cloud-based home where your team can create, collaborate, approve and store your standardized documents. Ensuring important information like charters, agendas, minutes, and SMP letters during a clinical trial can save days, if not weeks, in labor time spent searching archives and emails for these files.
Remember, time is money for sponsors and CROs. Time also represents quality of life for patients and families. Improve your communication cadence by ensuring your digital homebase can also act as a one-stop shop for all of the oversight activities that your committee is required to perform around that information.
Best Practice 3: Automate Where Able
DSMBs,DMCs, SRCs and other oversight committees often have to review large amounts of data during clinical trials as a critical function of their role. This can be a time-consuming process, particularly if the data is not organized in an easily accessible way. One way to make this process more efficient is to automate key processes.
This is another instance where choosing the right clinical trial management platform can improve the operational efficiency of your clinical trial. Eliminate wasted time by automating repetitive tasks like meeting scheduling, document review, decision making and activity documentation with role-based workflows, task deadline alerts for more efficient execution of study oversight protocol steps.
Best Practice 4: Create End-to-End Transparency
To quickly make informed decisions, oversight boards need instant access to relevant data collected during the study. All participants in oversight processes also need transparency into the current state of any outstanding tasks, assignments, or projects that team members are working on to reduce operational redundancies and eliminate the need for ad hoc status checks.
Not only does complete transparency vital for improving oversight operational speed, it can also save time in proving security and compliance during the trial to regulatory bodies. A solid clinical trial management platform should come equipped with the tools you need to provide end-to-end transparency, including:
Global Dashboards: Aggregate important information within and across your study.
System Integration: Make data from multiple sources more accessible.
Robust Reporting: Track and measure a multitude of metrics and activities through automated reporting.
Bonus Best Practice: Choosing The Best Software to Manage Your Clinical Trial
To operate as efficiently as possible, oversight boards and committees deserve the best possible software tools. Cloud Concinnity® was built specifically to meet the unique needs of clinical trial oversight boards. Our platform delivers facilitated access, controlled process, and transparent outcomes that support oversight committees and patient safety while bringing life saving therapeutics to market.
Schedule your free demo of Cloud Concinnity® to learn how our system can help make your next clinical trial a success.
By far the number one way for oversight boards to operate more efficiently is to be proactive in identifying their needs instead of reactive when problems arise. Whether you're planning your next clinical trial, or you’re in the middle of one, now is the time to examine your systems and processes to identify ways to improve your operational efficiency.