SiteCoach
PPD
Rhonda Henry, Vice President, Site Collaborations and Patient Centricity
rhonda.henry@ppdi.com
Due to a crowded clinical trial landscape, a shortage of high-quality sites are available for sponsors for certain indications and parts of the world. PPD recognized this obstacle and sought out to address this need.
PPD began offering ad hoc training sessions tailored to client specific needs. As the popularity of these sessions grew, the knowledge shared was compiled into a single course built around specific site staff clinical competencies, aligned to current Good Clinical Practices guidelines and illustrated by real-life scenarios and activities. PPD saw the opportunity to expand this service to correctly train new-to-research sites from the very beginning in order to provide quality data. In October 2019, PPD officially launched its comprehensive training program, SiteCoach.
This innovative model is an easy-to-use program for healthcare practices new to clinical research who are interested in joining the research community to offer their patients new treatment opportunities. SiteCoach includes appropriate tools and comprehensive training at each critical stage of the clinical trial process. Training can be delivered virtually, face-to-face, or combined, as needed. Features include a user-friendly online interface, a learner community portal offering resources and tools, a learner forum, and mobile gaming designed to increase learner retention. And by offering sessions with other new sites, SiteCoach creates networking and collaboration opportunities both during the training and through the portal.
A SiteCoach pilot was conducted in Thailand, providing training to new-to-research investigators in remote areas whose patients otherwise would not have benefitted from participation in a clinical trial. The enrollment rate for sites participating in the pilot was 70% higher, whereas screen failure rates and quality findings were almost 10% lower than other research sites in the study.
