Conducting manual clinical research can be a tedious process, from getting your participants and ensuring you’re compliant with the rules and regulations to managing the data you’ve gathered. Luckily, the past decade has integrated technology into healthcare and, more so, in research.
With the rise in medical technology, you can now address research challenges. Modern advancements in the medical field can aid in making your clinical trials well organized, reduce overall costs, and lead to greater success. Some of these technologies include artificial intelligence and the use of digital databases.
For instance, with essential standards such as analysis data model (ADaM) technology, you can quickly generate tables and listings. And among the core facts about ADM technology is that it helps with unambiguous communication of data sets during research and gives easy traceability between the source data and the analysis.
Furthermore, below are other trends and innovations that can help you in your clinical research:
- Mobile Patient Recruitment
The current technological innovations can help with your patient recruitment problems. Through mobile communication, you can reach out to those you want to include in your study. You can reach those people as long as you have a good internet connection and contact information.
Also, you can leverage social media platforms and your company website to recruit trial participants. The benefit of such platforms is that you get a diverse group to study instead of one community within your reach. This way, your research is extensive.
Once you’ve recruited your participants, you can utilize an electronic way to capture their informed consent. This protects your research from any legal action based on participant consent. You can easily store electronic consent documents and avoid the risk of losing them easily.
- Easy Patient Data Capture And Storage
The accuracy and reliability of your clinical research heavily rely on the patient data you gather, and modern solutions can help you with that. For instance, technology like smartphone applications and wearable medical devices can track patient health in real time and give you raw data you can use for your research. With this, you can automate your data collection and access it remotely.
Technology also avails databases that you can use in classifying and storing this data. Unlike paper files or printed documents, a digital database can make access easy through the search button for any data set you may need. Another benefit is that databases can reduce the clutter in your clinical research office because you only need a computer to store all your files.
- Data Security And Privacy
The collection of patient data is only one part of the process, as you’ll also need to safeguard it throughout the research duration. This is especially since the data you have for your clinical research is always private patient information. And so, protecting it from unauthorized access should be a priority.
Fortunately, technology has introduced good information security policies that you can utilize in storing critical information. Policies like strong passwords, two-step verification, and biometric access to systems secure your data, ensuring its confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
In addition, technology makes compliance with data security and privacy laws set for clinical research by the government easy and manageable. It introduces infrastructure, data storage processes, and a continuous way for you to assess and update your security. You can say technology is good based on how it makes your medical research safer and easier to store.
- Clinical Research Data Sharing
As you do your clinical research, you’ll need to collaborate study data, medical records, and findings with your participants and various professionals in the field to get their insights and share where you are in the process.
Unlike the manual approach, with technology, you can share documents and records with ease. Efficient coordination within the organization can also be achieved. You can even communicate internationally, especially if you’re doing a trial with professionals from other countries.
For instance, modern tools like the electronic health records system can make it easy for you to share medical records and findings with other doctors. Other platforms like emails and cloud storage could also make collaboration easy and convenient with your team wherever they are.
- Remote Patient Monitoring
Part of the clinical research process includes constant monitoring of patients or participants involved, which covers their way of life, what they eat, and how the treatment or medication affects their well-being, to name a few. While researchers can monitor their patients on-site, with technology, there’s also the option to do it remotely.
For example, video conferencing tools make it easy to contact patients and even do checkups online. If your research requires patient interviews, you can do it over the phone instead of physically traveling. Telemedicine applications enable you to reach out to them without having to do it in person.
- Predictive Analytics
With the current innovations in medical technology, you can use machine learning algorithms in various stages of your research process and even during the simulation of your trials.
Clinical research is all about identifying patterns based on patient data. Today, you can use predictive analytic technology to sort out this data and outline the correlations between your patient demographics, drug response, and genetic data. As a result, predictive analytics can aid in accelerating the clinical trial research process. It gives you a way to model the research outcomes to improve treatments.
For instance, if you’re researching a drug or medication, predictive analytics technology can help you predict the trial’s outcomes by identifying the clinical events influencing the research. You can also predict the possible side effects based on the data you already have. Moreover, predictive analysis can also help in assessing how certain drugs may interact with various disorders and diseases. And through analyzing the patient data, you can predict those patients fit for the research.
Ultimately, the volume of data you have to process and analyze in clinical research is vast, and you need such technology to make your analysis better and faster.
Conclusion
It is without a doubt how technology has influenced industries today, and the medical and clinical research fields are no exception. With the trends and innovations like those mentioned in this list, the research process can become more efficient and productive.
Depending on the nature of your research, you can adopt these technologies to ensure smoother clinical research with favorable outcomes.
