At OpenClinica we are driven to reduce obstacles to the advancement of medical research. The OpenClinica open source project started because EDC was too complex, too inaccessible, and too expensive. Not to mention far too difficult to evaluate and improve. So we built an EDC / CDMS platform and released it under an open source license. It is now the world’s most widely used open source EDC system and has an active, growing user community.
As the user base grew, we listened to users and understood that integration and interoperability were another major obstacle. While we don’t claim to have fully cracked that nut yet, OpenClinica’s CDISC ODM-based APIs have been pretty widely adopted and helped to drive some significant innovations. These APIs have been improved upon by a large number of developers in the few years they have been part of the codebase.
As we continue to improve the clinical and researcher experience, our attention has more recently been directed to the experience of trial participants. The difficulty of meaningful, timely engagement with these volunteers also strikes us as an obstacle to successful research. We live in a world where 90% of American adults have mobile phones, 81% text, and 63% use their phone to go online (Pew), and even older age groups are adopting smartphones at a rapid pace [1]. Because of this, we think that mobile technology could be a pretty effective means to help more meaningfully engage participants research.
Why is this important? Treating research volunteers as participants, as opposed to subjects, can lead to concrete benefits – improving participation, motivation, and adherence. Increasing your ability to meet recruitment goals, budget, and completion timelines. Getting more complete, timely data. Even enabling new protocol designs that better target populations and/or more closely align with real-world use. But most of all, it just seems like the right thing to do. As one HIV trial participant put it, “I’d initially had this nagging fear in my head, that, once recruited, I would cease to be nothing more than a patient number – a series of digits, test results and charts in a file – which is quite a daunting prospect when you’re not entirely sure how your body is going to respond to the vaccine. This could not have been further from the reality of the trial. I felt safe, informed and valued at every stage of the trial.”
The great (and often unrecognized) news is that so many of the people involved in research and care already do an unbelievable job creating this type of engagement – making participants feel safe, informed, and valued. But it takes a lot of work. With a mobile-enabled, real-time solution like OpenClinica Participate, you can provide an engagement channel and data capture experience that is simple, elegant, and easy to use on any device. Because it is fully integrated with OpenClinica and captures data in a regulatory-compliant manner, you can reduce time and headache for your research team from, for instance, merging disparate sources of data and keying in paper reports. Leaving you more time to focus on the kinds of human to human engagement that technology cannot do.
[1] For the over 55 age group, most likely to participate in many types of trials, the picture is a bit different. As of 2013, around 80% have mobile phone but only 37% are smartphones. However over-55s are the fastest growing smartphone adopters, expected by Deloitte to soon reach 50% and reach parity with other age groups by 2020.Outside of the developed world, the picture is different, though the opposite of what you might expect. According to Donna Malvey, PhD, co-author of mHealth: Transforming Healthcare, cell phones are even more pervasive, and mHealth “apps are the difference between life and death. If you’re in Africa and you have a sick baby, mHealth apps enable you to get healthcare you would normally not have access to… In China and India, in particular, mobile apps can bring healthcare to rural areas. “