Clinical Operations: What It Is And Why It's Important - Octalsoft

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The role of clinical operations in the drug development lifecycle, as well as the technologies that may be used to speed the process while preserving compliance.

Clinical operations, sometimes known as ClinOps, ensure that patients receive the best possible treatment. Apart from that, the clinical operation includes compliance with regulatory criteria and standards.

In the United States alone, there are about 23,000 clinical operations managers. While these experts and their teams are at the core of clinical trial success, understanding their position within a healthcare institution is not always straightforward.

This article aims to explain what clinical operations are and why they are important. So without further ado, let’s get to it.

Why are Clinical Operations Important?

Clinical operations are an essential component of the healthcare ecosystem since they ensure that the services provided by a healthcare organization are effective. The operations department strives to ensure that all clinical personnel and patients have everything they need to work effectively together and that the process ...
... runs smoothly.

These teams can be particularly useful during the drug development lifecycle. Following the completion of discovery and preclinical research, the clinical development phase begins. Clinical trials and volunteer studies are conducted during this stage to establish that the medicine is safe for human use. ClinOps plays a critical role in ensuring the success of such studies.

It is vital to distinguish between clinical operations and clinical development. Read a client case study on clinical trial design to learn more about clinical development versus clinical operations.

Common Activities and Responsibilities in Clin-Ops
Several operational functions in the healthcare business are handled by this team. These are some examples:

Patient Flow: Patient flow refers to how patients progress through a clinical experiment.
To prevent damage, ensure that all healthcare personnel adhere to safety standards and rules.

Quality Assurance: clinical operations monitoring to verify that the trial satisfies the criteria of regulatory authorities. Chart audits, clinical peer review programs, and quality improvement teams are examples of QA tools.

Apart from those specific responsibilities, every clinical operations staff member must be aware of what is trending in healthcare and how those trends may affect procedures in the future.

3 Trends Impacting Clin-Ops

What trends should companies be aware of in order to better support the patient journey and conduct more effective trials? These are just a few examples:

1. Changes in Technology and Delivery of Care
Data growth and technological advancements are having an impact on healthcare. The digital health market is predicted to reach almost US$660 billion by 2025, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 25%.

Organizations must understand how this affects the clinical trial process. It's also an opportunity to find new methods to streamline clinical supply operations and harness all of the data that we now have access to through clinical monitoring and operations.

2. Increasing Decentralization
The advantages of decentralized clinical trials were clear during the epidemic, and they are likely to remain so. DCTs and their associated clinical operations software can help pharmaceutical firms receive the information they need better and quicker, and ClinOps has mechanisms in place to keep up with the pace of change.

3. Impact on the Patient Experience
People desire to be more involved in their healthcare and to have their concerns heard. This is great news for clinical studies, as now people are more interested in participating. Time and effort must be invested in enhancing the clinical trial experience from beginning to end to centralize clinical trial operations. Notwithstanding the difficulties associated with decentralized health care, individuals stand to profit from a health system that provides them with more options.

Tools that Ensure Success in Clinical Operations
Numerous different clinical operations tools assist in ensuring various areas of clinical operations success, including compliance, better patient retention, and investigator satisfaction.

EDC and EHR systems can provide real-time clinical decision support, people management, and other tasks.

Role-based credentialing and access mechanisms guarantee that information is only seen (and understood) by those who should see it.

HIPAA compliance practices or software to maintain compliance during the trial process.

Insight management technologies, such as asynchronous engagement and artificial intelligence, assist teams in identifying patterns or areas of concern.

Several tools may be used depending on the activities of your individual healthcare or pharmaceutical firm. While identifying and mitigating compliance difficulties is the most important part, patient retention is also key to successful trials.

In Summation
ClinOps may lack the thrill of clinical science or the glitz of marketing. But, because of its breadth, it has a little bit of everything. ClinOps teams work in research, medical, project management, operations, marketing, legal, regulatory, and data management.

At the end of the day, Clinical Operations is responsible for the actual (and crucial!) task of completing the last stage of drug development. A step that, if done correctly, can alleviate the agony of hundreds to millions of patients now and in the future.

Octalsoft has already begun to step into the future with a full array of eClinical software solutions. Do you want to know how Octalsoft can help you overcome current clinical trial problems, speed the discovery of novel therapeutics, and usher in a new age of evidence-based medicine that helps patients worldwide? Book a demo with us now!