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4 Challenges You’ll Encounter When Managing Clinical Trials

Even with the best clinical trial design, you still could be faced with some challenges during the Veristat clinical trial process. And if you aren’t careful enough, launching the research successfully and maintaining a smooth operation to the end will be impossible.

So, which are these challenges that many researchers face in nearly all clinical research? How do you establish solid clinical trial planning to eliminate the obstacles and increase the chances of completing the trial successfully? Let’s find out.

Slow Recruitment Procedure

Recruiting and retaining enough participants is one of the major challenges you’ll tackle in clinical trial management. This is because finding the right patients with particular conditions for the study is no easy task. And failure to draft working strategies to overcome this challenge will severely delay or shut down your trial. Research reveals that 80% of clinical studies fail to meet enrollment deadlines, while 50% recruit one or no patients. How do you go about the patient recruitment dilemma? First, start by planning accordingly. If you’re in doubt about your ability to enroll enough participants by yourself, employ a patient recruitment company to handle this for you.

Compliance Barriers

Introducing a new drug or therapy into the industry is a sensitive issue that the government must weigh in. Meaning, you must meet some qualifications and comply with several regulations. And considering that clinical trials have dozens of players – vendors, stakeholders, contract research organizations (CRO), and more – you’ll have lots of regulations to adhere to together with plenty of approvals to go through. This can be a pressing challenge that impacts your enrollment timelines and the general trial time frame. To handle this, remember to set proper record-keeping solutions to help you spot issues that can result in non-compliance. This way, the approval process will be fast, and you’ll comply with the set clinical trials regulations.

Site Selection and Management Difficulties

Site selection contributes hugely to the general performance of a clinical trial. For starters, it determines how easily patients will access the facility in terms of infrastructure and distance from their homes. For instance, a site miles away from patients’ homes might discourage participation due to long journeys when reporting for result collection. And this might hurt patient retention in your clinical study. Here’s how you can remedy this. Choose the trial site with much keenness. Consider how the site’s location affects participants to avoid discouraging participation.  As for the management challenges, bring in a Contract Research Organization (CRO). Alternatively, employ a strong Clinical Trials Management System (CTMS) to help organize data and monitor finances.

High operational cost

When launching or managing clinical trials, you can expect many cost-drivers like lab costs, administrative staff, compliance expenditures, data management technology, patient recruitment, and the therapeutic area. When combined, these cost-drivers reflect heavy expenses. To ease the burden, create a budget to avoid misusing funds. This way, you’ll only channel resources to specific processes that drive success in the trial.

With enough resources and clear ways around the different challenges you might face during the trial, it’s easy to run a successful clinical trial to completion.

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