Four Tips to Get Your CRAs and Sites to Adopt Remote Clinical Monitoring

As a sponsor interested in investing in a remote clinical monitoring platform in clinical trials, it is important to determine how you will support your Clinical Research Associates (CRAs) during and after the transition.

CRAs are the main personnel who will be engaging daily with the remote monitoring platform and with the sites conducting the clinical trial. If sites refuse to adopt the new technology due to faulty remote monitoring and implementation strategies, your CRAs will be burdened with low site adoption rates and disjointed processes.

Ultimately, setting up your CRAs and sites for success will play a big part in whether your remote monitoring technology produces the process efficiencies you expect.

As Director of Customer Experience at an Electronic Investigator Site File (eISF) and remote access technology vendor, I have worked with all sizes of sponsors and CROs during implementation, training and technology management processes.

Through my experience, I’ve learned that there are certain strategies that are exceedingly effective for sponsors and CROs to ensure both their CRAs and sites are supported for high levels of site acceptance and streamlined remote monitoring.

In this article, I will cover the top 4 tips for CRAs and sites that every sponsor and CRO needs to know before implementing a remote site monitoring strategy in clinical trials.

Overall, sites and CRAs want to utilize this technology as much as the the sponsor/CRO decision makers who decided to purchase it. Roadblocks to site adoption and streamlined processes arise when sponsors and CROs do not communicate their plan or include the voice of both internal and external stakeholders in the technology rollout.

Sites should never have to convince monitors to use the technology, but rather the two groups should work together to determine the workflows that are most appropriate to the CRA and site, and for the study needs.

About the Author

Lauren Martin is Director of Customer Experience at Florence, the leading eISF + Remote Site Access platform in clinical trials with more than 8,500 study sites in 34 countries connected to the platform. Lauren works with research sites, sponsors and CROs to implement new technology, train internal and external teams, and manage customer satisfaction.