Clinical study coordinator improves trials according to new research

Clinical study coordinators make research more efficient, accelerate patient recruitment and aid retention according to analysis looking at the differences between successful sites and those that struggle.

The analysis – available here – set out to quantify the benefits that study coordinator provide to research sites, using various centers in Asia and Europe as examples.

According to the authors “The entire clinical trial process is a perfectly orchestrated team. It took many years before centers started hiring clinical trial coordinators.

“The centers that decided to do so noted not only positive aspects from the technical side of the study, but also from the side of the participants - which are the patients.”

Clinical coordinator

A clinical trial coordinator is a person hired to support the team and the principal investigator during the conduct of a clinical trial. Most often it is an employee of the medical center, or it can be externally hired person with the prior approval of the center.

And the benefits of having a coordinator are clear, according to the study.

For example, sites that had a coordinator saw a 99.1% increase in knowledge of patient rights compared with those without a coordinator. Similarly, the quality –measured by various metrics – of studies run at sites with a coordinator were deemed to be 80% higher, while consent withdrawal by patients was 70% lower.

Patient trust

And there were other non-operational benefits according to the authors, who write “Those teams that worked without the support of a coordinator gained less trust among patients, which affected recruitment and retention of participants. The coordinator’s influence on study management resulted in better organization of the study.”

They conclude that “Hiring a coordinator not only has an impact on improving the management of the study, but also on increasing the number of patients included, and thus increasing the therapeutic options in medicine.”

Unsplash/MarcSendraMartorell