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Home » Sponsors Still Not Leveraging Site Experiences, Feedback, Survey Shows
Sponsors Still Not Leveraging Site Experiences, Feedback, Survey Shows
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June 26, 2023
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Fewer than one-in-five sites strongly feel trials are being crafted with them in mind, highlighting an unmet need for greater engagement by sponsors, a new survey finds.
WCG Avoca’s 2022 State of the Industry Report gauged the experiences of survey respondents across the stakeholder spectrum, including sites, sponsors, patients, participants, providers, and investigators, offering a multifaceted look at perceptions of clinical research today.
While 65 percent of site staff responding to the survey agreed that sponsors are designing trials in a patient-centric manner, only a small fraction (15 percent) of the site respondents strongly agreed that sponsors are taking sites into consideration when designing their protocols.
Key elements of the trial process, from startup to maintenance and trial closeout, are still suboptimal in terms of logistics and burden, site respondents said.
Just 31 percent of sites strongly agreed that budget negotiation and contracting was timely and efficient for them, according to the new findings, and only 38 percent agreed that the protocols they ran were easy to understand and follow. Even fewer sites (29 percent) saw their trials remain on their timelines, and just 27 percent of sites felt they were compensated fairly and punctually.
To Cristin MacDonald, WCG Avoca’s vice president of client delivery, site advisory boards are just as critical as patient advisory boards during the protocol design process to achieve optimal, efficient trials.
“We work a lot with sponsor companies to put together patient advisory boards,” MacDonald told CenterWatch Weekly. “Much like we ask sponsors to get a diverse group of patient feedback when designing a protocol, we also want to get multiple diverse sites together to review protocols and the operational risk that is inherent … based on the type of site that is executing on the protocol.”
“Engaging these diverse voices in the protocol design phase is imperative,” MacDonald said.
But convening site advisory boards “is the exception rather than the norm,” according to Sandy Smith, WCG’s senior vice president of clinical solutions and strategic partnering. “If a key opinion leader has been asked to review a protocol, it might be shared with a CRC, but this is not commonplace,” Smith said. “Sponsors are missing an important bit of site intel.”
Frequent check-ins on the state of the sponsor-site relationship throughout the entire trial process are also important — perhaps more so — to ensure sites’ experiences are being heard and factored into protocol design and support, MacDonald advised. These “constant pulse checks” help sponsors unravel protocol-related issues and identify/mitigate risks in real-time based on site feedback.
The survey findings also suggest that sponsors/providers don’t have a firm understanding of the reasons sites take on trials. Asked to name their most significant reasons for taking part in clinical research, sites overwhelmingly cited altruistic purposes: 96 percent of sites named contributing to scientific advancement; 95 percent named the ability to provide new and improved treatments to patients; 89 percent named curiosity or interest in new treatments; 87 percent cited a desire to stay current with treatments in specialty areas; and 63 percent named compensation as a motivating factor.
Yet sponsor and provider responses varied when asked about the reasons they believed sites participated: 49 percent felt it was to bring new and better therapies to patients, 43 percent felt it was to contribute to scientific advancement, 39 percent cited compensation/financial reasons, and 10 percent felt it was for acclaim and prestige.
Notably, while two-thirds of sites named compensation/financial reasons as a key reason for participation, just 39 percent of sponsors/providers believed this was a primary reason sites took on trials.
MacDonald advises struggling sites to provide sponsors with feedback and direct them to resources that demonstrate site challenges in a quantifiable manner, such as CenterWatch’s Global Site Relationship Benchmark Survey.
Sites should consider providing sponsors with comparisons to their experiences with other sponsors, almost like a “report card,” that serve as tangible evidence the feedback is valid and worth acting on. In particular, data is key to convincing sponsors, she says.
“The more we can be data-based and data-driven in the feedback, the harder it will be to ignore,” she said.
Access the full survey findings here: https://bit.ly/3XnAgzW.
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