Earlene Biggs, VP of Market Research & Analytics at ICON, sat down with me to discuss best practices for life science market research and actionable analytics. She also shared her tips for creating organizational wellbeing and inclusiveness, plus much more.
Here is a sneak peek of our conversation:
Q: Can you tell us, from your viewpoint, what happened to these standards, protocols, and the ways that we’ve been doing clinical research for years and years? What happened when Covid-19 occurred?
A: Great question! It is a very complex dynamic that we live in. When COVID-19 occurred, worldwide, people were having to isolate and were no longer able to engage in the world around them as they normally do. With clinical trials, what happened was, in the need to have a paced, documented, scheduled care around diseases that are in trials, that was interrupted. The ability to hit those milestones in terms of the execution of care that’s required in clinical trials became very difficult. There was a little bit of a scramble to try and hit those markers. How do we make sure there’s no interruption in care during those clinical trials very quickly?
In some cases, it was really switching out treatments for some of the more standard of care, postponing the trial, if you will. You almost have a stop-gap between data collection issues. Those had to be handled on a trial-by-trial, case-by-case basis in terms of what was acceptable. The other piece of that, and I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of talk about decentralized clinical trials, but it was really, “where are there situations where care can be provided by an alternative means?”, “where can we use non-contact procedures to be able to continue with care and a trial?”.
Fortunately, in development that had already been in consideration. We’re thinking about how can we be more efficient. There’s already some thinking behind it. It just accelerated our ability to really put forward ways in which we can provide care through alternative medicine, or methods to capture and track that data. Those kinds of procedures had to be really more standardized and put in place very quickly and then monitored. I think it expedited the whole idea and acceptance of decentralized trials. Having had a little bit of foundation to move forward on, was very helpful.
For more of our discussion, you can watch the whole Fireside Chat with Earlene Biggs, or listen to the podcast version, below.
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