By Andrea Bastek, VP of Innovations and Gunnar Esiason, Principle KOL Patients and Strategy Lead @ Florence

Florence recently hosted an innovation workshop at the 2023 MAGI East Conference with the goal of facilitating cross-industry collaboration on some big-ticket items like site feasibility, developing a tech enabled workforce, remote monitoring and standing up frontier sites. The session was a new spin on the way we have historically hosted sessions at trade shows wherein we asked teams of attendees to assume the role of either a site or a sponsor and tackle one of our prompted topics. Following a brief working session, we then encouraged the teams to present their findings to the room before facing a round of constructive criticism (or constructive support) from the rest of the room, while the rest of the room was asked to assume the opposite persona (e.g. if a site team was presenting, the room would offer feedback from the sponsor perspective).

Several themes clearly jumped off the page as the session went on. We heard about:

•       Change Management

•       Incentives

•       Communication and Feedback Loops

•       Technology Integration

In one case, we learned how a site manages new technology adoption with workforce incentives, and in another case, a site offered a way for front line workers to offer feedback on the standard workflows outside of the typical organization chart in order to iterate and refine processes to improve system usability and drive adoption.

Crucially, managers in our session agreed. They suggested that feedback loops are a big part of adopting new technology and infusing cross-industry relationships into their own standard operating procedures or workflows.

When our sponsor teams took to the stage to present what the future of clinical trials might look like with frontier sites at the center of tomorrow’s trials, site validation and diligence was at the forefront of their comments.

As a site enablement provider, we at Florence feel as though we have a front row seat to many of the inefficiencies permeating through the clinical research industry – and we are working to solve some of them. We also have a unique vantage point to see that cross-industry discussion and problem solving is rare but desperately needed. As a tech provider with strong relationships on both sides of the clinical trial “aisle” we often work to bridge the divide. We host Innovation Summits, an annual Research Revolution industry conference, and we founded the Site Enablement League – a league of industry leaders collaborating to solve the “Cure Acceleration Gap,” a pervasive capacity issue that impacts everyone in this space. The interactions at these events are genuine and valuable – we see different organizations sharing best practices and we always see learning from across the aisle – sites or sponsors learning something new about each other and the clinical trial process. This MAGI Innovation Workshop was just one more example, and provided a unique and refreshing experience. It was the eureka moments that did it for us, hearing statements like, “hey our site handles change management in that way, too.”

If you’d like to be part of the conversation on new innovations in clinical trials, subscribe to our newsletter to be notified next time we host an Innovation Summit, OR…

Take the first step towards enhancing your clinical trial management today. Click here to schedule a demo and discover how Florence’s Site Enablement Platform can work for you.