Remote patient monitoring (RPM) is becoming more common in clinical trials. This means that CROs, study sponsors, and other interested parties can access the data from anywhere. Additionally, it enables healthcare professionals to provide remote care to patients in faraway locations. When combined with clinical development consulting, remote health monitoring opens up new ways to get important real-time data. It also helps healthcare clinicians enhance care decisions and results. RPM also reduces patient drop-out rates and hospital admissions and readmissions.
What value can remote monitoring contribute to virtual clinical trials? Let’s find out.
Remote site monitoring reduces data gaps
Because the trial data is always being checked, the study team can promptly identify missing data and notice any odd deviations, allowing for prompt intervention, if needed. For instance, if participants in at-home clinical trials forget to perform a task, the research team can get in contact with them to clear up any questions or concerns before they escalate. For trials with on-site monitoring, members often don’t know about problems with following the protocol until a participant tells them in person. At this time, it is usually too late to change a patient’s behavior, the information has been lost, and recall bias is comparatively high.
Course correction
For every day that a product’s development and launch are delayed, a sponsor can lose anywhere from $600,000 to $8 million. However, when the research team can view the data in real-time thanks to remote monitoring, any problems that may exist within the study are typically discovered rather quickly. This enables the researchers to fix the issues before they become too difficult and expensive to fix.
AE detection
Trials using remote monitoring detect adverse events earlier because data access happens more quickly. Patients can easily get in touch with a person in charge of the study at any time of day or night to report any symptoms they may be having. In a site-based strategy, there are fewer ways for information to flow, so it’s less likely that adverse events and serious adverse events will be found and reported. This means that patients are safer in trials with remote monitoring.
Data cleansing
Errors are unavoidable as people use apps to record their data. To avoid affecting data interpretation, these flaws must be “cleaned up.” In many traditional systems, the participant has to go to the site in person to send information. Only then can a study doctor find and fix mistakes. The study team can only look for mistakes when putting information from an original document into a database. Even then, the clinical research team can make further errors through data transfer. In a virtual or hybrid trial design that uses remote monitoring, the patient’s information is directly sent into a database. There isn’t a need to perform manual file transfers, and there is no increased risk of error. Instead, the people working on the study can look at the data as it comes in. This makes sure that mistakes are found and fixed quickly. Don’t forget that this method can be tweaked to let the staff know about unusual data. They don’t have to look through each data set to find problems.
Remote Patient Monitoring merges real-world data and transmission to give clinical trial staff better insights into an investigational product’s efficacy, product compliance, and participant behaviors. It allows researchers and providers to address patients’ needs while ensuring patient safety, study integrity, and data quality.
