Preview of Enrollment Analytics: Moving Beyond the Funnel (Shameless DIA Self-Promotion, Part 2)

Are we looking at our enrollment data in the right way?

I will be chairing a session on Tuesday on this topic, joined by a couple of great presenters (Diana Chung from Gilead and Gretchen Goller from PRA).

Here's a short preview of the session:

Hope to see you there. It should be a great discussion.

Session Details:

June 25, 1:45PM - 3:15PM

• Session Number: 241
• Room Number: 205B

1. Enrollment Analytics: Moving Beyond the Funnel
Paul Ivsin
VP, Consulting Director
CAHG Clinical Trials

2. Use of Analytics for Operational Planning
Diana Chung, MSc
Associate Director, Clinical Operations
Gilead

3. Using Enrollment Data to Communicate Effectively with Sites
Gretchen Goller, MA
Senior Director, Patient Access and Retention Services
PRA

Pediatric Trial Enrollment (Shameless DIA Self-Promotion, Part 1)

[Fair Warning: I have generally tried to keep this blog separate from my corporate existence, but am making an exception for two quick posts about the upcoming DIA 2013 Annual Meeting.]

Improving Enrollment in Pediatric Clinical Trials

Logistically, ethically, and emotionally, involving children in medical research is greatly different from the same research in adults. Some of the toughest clinical trials I've worked on, across a number of therapeutic areas, have been pediatric ones. They challenge you to come up with different approaches to introducing and explaining clinical research – approaches that have to work for doctors, kids, and parents simultaneously.

On Thursday June 27, Don Sickler, one of my team members, will be chairing a session titled “Parents as Partners: Engaging Caregivers for Pediatric Trials”. It should be a good session.

Joining Don are 2 people I've had the pleasure of working with in the past. Both of them combine strong knowledge of clinical research with a massive amount of positive energy and enthusiasm (no doubt a big part of what makes them successful).

However, they also differ in one key aspect: what they work on. One of them – Tristen Moors from Hyperion Therapeutics - works on an ultra-rare condition, Urea Cycle Disorder, a disease affecting only a few hundred children every year. On the other hand, Dr. Ann Edmunds is an ENT working in a thriving private practice. I met her because she was consistently the top enroller in a number of trials relating to tympanostomy tube insertion. Surgery to place “t-tubes” is one of the most common and routine outpatients surgeries there is, with an estimated half million kids getting tubes each year.

Each presents a special challenge: for rare conditions, how do you even find enough patients? For routine procedures, how do you convince parents to complicate their (and their children’s) lives by signing up for a multi-visit, multi-procedure trial?

Ann and Tristen have spent a lot of time tackling these issues, and should have some great advice to give.

For more information on the session, here’s Don’s posting on our news blog.

DIA: Tutti, ma non troppo

I will be at DIA 2012 this week, and hope to post about sessions and new offerings of interest as I encounter them.

There is an inherent tension in this year’s meeting theme, “Collaborate to Innovate”. Collaboration at its best exposes us to new ideas and, even more importantly, new ways of thinking. That novelty can catalyze our own thinking and bring us to flashes of insight, producing creative solutions to our most intransigent problems.

However, collaboration often requires accommodation – multiple stakeholders with their own wants and needs that must be fairly and collectively addressed. Too often, this has the unfortunate result of sacrificing creativity for the sake of finding a solution that everyone can accept. Rather than blazing a new trail (with all its attendant risks), we are forced to find an established trail wide enough to accommodate everybody. Some of the least creative work in our industry is done by joint ventures and partnered programs.

So perhaps the best way forward is: Collaborate, but not too much. We must take time to seek out and integrate new approaches, but real breakthroughs tend to require a lot of individual courage and determination.