Top 4 Trends In Clinical Data Management

The world is at a fast pace of transitioning from traditional to digital, high-tech clinical data management methods, like other industries and sectors. Medical professionals and pharmaceutical businesses now adopt modern innovative solutions, from clinical trials, diagnosis, to patient data documentation. But, what are the latest solutions or trends in clinical data management?

In this article, you’ll learn the top trends in clinical data management today to show how they can improve healthcare research and development and patient care services, paving the way for digital transformation.

Cloud-Based Clinical Metadata Repositories

Because of the increasing demand for newer and better drugs, clinical trials need to accelerate. Hence, organizations are trying to find ways to improve their operations to launch more successful trials.

Pharmaceutical and biotechnology facilities continue to improve the elements of designing and developing clinical trials. However, organizations face great challenges in metadata collection, management, and analysis. Installation of multiple desktop applications makes clinical metadata difficult to manage. So, what’s the best solution to this problem?

Cloud-based clinical metadata repositories (CMDR) pave the way to centralized metadata. This technology helps standardize clinical trial design and development. With cloud-based clinical metadata repositories, research facilities can gain the following benefits: 

- Standardization Of Clinical Metadata: Clinical research facilities can ensure standardized data collection in all stages of trials, from planning to analysis. Standardized metadata can be easily accessed and reused as necessary when setting up a new trial to avoid creating new, similar content.

- Regulatory Compliance: Advanced CMDR systems remain up to date with changing regulatory standards. A validation check alerts users to any non-compliance issue when importing data that prompts corrective action.

- Productivity And Cost-Efficiency: Another benefit of using this technology is decreased costs in hiring more people to manage data. Instead of manually tracking changes, researchers can rely on CMDR and focus on the other important aspects of clinical trials.

Electronic Case Report Form

Accurate data is necessary for a successful clinical trial. Whether studying a new medication, device, therapy, or any other latest discovery, it’s best to deploy digitalization. Omit using paper-based data collection to avoid errors when migrating to electronic format. Instead, use eCRF to reduce operational costs, increase clinical trial participation, and access records securely and quickly. Using eCRF can also increase trial efficiency.  

Electronic Clinical Outcome Assessment

With the eCOA solution, clinical trial facilities can automate data entry to ensure data accuracy. It also helps improve patient care through remote assessments. Clinicians can use biosensor-enabled devices, wearables, and self-service apps for this purpose. 

Data management experts are often sought in designing eCOA. With this collaboration, companies ensure protocol and subject compliance. Clinical researchers can also benefit from using user-friendly interfaces and ease in training using the new application for virtual visits.

Virtual visits powered by eCOA offer the following benefits: 

- Improve Patient Experience: Clinical participants who have commuting and logistical challenges remain in the study. This technology offers utmost convenience, reducing the number of missed dosages and follow-up sessions. 

- Increase Patient Compliance: Remote visits also increase patient compliance because clinicians or staff can remind patients outright to perform an activity or take the medication as a crucial part of the clinical study.

- Diversify Data: With eCOA, you can conduct a study involving a larger geographical area to cover a more diverse population. As such, you’ll land to more conclusive findings.

- Real Time Data: Clinical researchers can obtain accurate data in real time and they can encourage patients to stay on track with a particular medication or regimen. Such similar scenario has a direct positive impact on patient compliance because patients and researchers can easily interact during the clinical trial. 

Artificial Intelligence 

Clinical trials use artificial intelligence or AI for recruitment and retention. For instance, this technology can help identify the right candidates quickly to accelerate research and development timelines. AI supports data management teams to detect erroneous data for risk-based management. 

AI can help identify problematic sites and patients’ patterns of behavior, and even in drug design. So, incompliant participants or outliers can be excluded from the clinical trial to avoid causing issues with the findings. With the help of data science, AI, machine learning, and other technologies, clinical facilities can resolve any challenges faster and easier.  

Conclusion

There are many challenges in clinical data management that digital technology can help resolve. By centralizing data with cloud-based clinical metadata repositories and adopting other innovative tech trends, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and other clinical facilities can obtain more accurate data and research findings. These clinical data management trends can accelerate clinical trials so companies can launch new and better drugs, treatments, and devices to improve the healthcare system.