A lot has happened in electronic support for clinical research in the last 20 years ... and eClinical Forum has been there discussing it all!  We are pleased to be celebrating our 20th anniversary year, stronger than ever with 45+ member companies (and growing), meetings on 3 continents, global webinars that have been attended by members in over 25 countries, very active project teams, meetings with regulators, and freely adding to the knowledge base of the industry. Any organization working in this space is welcome to join. Please see the membership tab on our website (www.eclinicalforum.org) or contact us for more information!  info@eclinicalforum.org

According to the FDA’s website, “Real-world data (RWD) and real-world evidence (RWE) are playing an increasing role in health care decisions.”  And a recent survey by the eClinical Forum showed that most respondents believe that RWD and RWE will become much more important in clinical research over the next few years.  As a result, many questions have arisen regarding the use cases, data sources, quality of these sources, regulatory guidance documents and so on. The goal of this “Birds of a Feather” session is to present some basic information on these topics and to present a few case examples to illustrate how RWD and RWE are playing an increasingly important role in research. 

Presenter/Facilitator:  Ken Light, Clinscape

In 1996, HIPAA legislation called for the development of a national patient identifier system that would give each person in the United States a permanently assigned, unique number to be used across the entire spectrum of the national healthcare system.   That project was never funded by congress, but just last year (June, 2019) Congress voted to appropriate $99 billion dollars to an HHS bill that included creation of a National Patient Identifier.

Ken will review this topic, and oversee a group dialog around the benefits, challenges, and impact related to healthcare and clinical trials.   

There has been a dramatic increase in clinical data types, sources and systems in recent years enabling new insights into patient experiences while also presenting challenges in consolidating, standardizing and analyzing these new data streams.  The tools for centralizing, integrating, mapping and analyzing data have not kept pace with research and are causing cycle time delays and require numerous manual processes.  This technology showcase will describe how new platforms like the elluminate Clinical Data Platform are automating the ingestion of data from numerous eClinical systems and sources, enabling faster data mapping and standardization, supporting risk based data review and advancing both clinical and operational analytics.  

Presented by Sheila Rocchio and Sam Parnell of eClinical Solutions.

Following the success of our Spring Virtual Workshop (see article below), we are now planning for an Autumn 2020 Virtual Workshop. This will replace face-to-face meetings in Asia, Europe and North America due to continued concern for our members safety during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is our hope that we will be able to resume face-to-face workshops in 2021 as our members have expressed their desire to get back to "getting together" in person once it is appropriate to do that, as they say "nothing can replace the networking and comeraderie of an eCF face-to-face meeting".

The Autumn 2020 Virtual Workshop will build on our success, learnings, and suggestions for improvement from the Spring Virtual Workshop. We plan to have more interactive sessions, more sessions that are regional-based to allow a better time-of-day for most participants, have some global sessions to allow for the valuable global interaction, and spread it over a full week with a few hours/day. We are currently in the planning stage and welcome suggestions to discussion topics via info@eclinicalforum.org as well as considering all suggestions submitted with the Spring workshop evaluations.

Please mark your calendars for Oct 12-16 2020 ... and stay tuned for more detailed information as we develop it!

The Virtual Workshop on May 11-13 that replaced the planned face-to-face Spring Workshops in Helsinki, Finland and Princeton, NJ was a huge success.  It was attended by over 130 members from around the globe, representing 46 member companies -- many of whom would not have been able to attend a face-to-face meeting and this was their first eCF workshop. 4 EMA inspectors and several guests also attended. Evaluations gave the workshop a 4.3/5.0 which is lower than our face-to-face workshops, but for our first virtual workshop we are happy with this grade!  A few comments from the evaluations: "Always an excellent group with many real experts.  The interactions are very good."  "Congratulations on an excellent event.  Everything worked well.  Sure, we missed the networking and evening events, but this worked well."  "eClinical Forum is a fantastic source of information about the landscape of eClinical today."  "eCF continues to be incredible value for money"

We are planning for another Virtual Workshop in Autumn 2020 (the week of October 12-16) and hoping to return to face-to-face workshops for Spring 2021. We now have a lot of good ideas for improvements for our 2nd Virtual Workshop! If anyone wants to make suggestions, please send to info@eclinicalforum.org. Thanks!!

As there are no regulatory detailed expectations on oversight by investigators on eCOA data, multiple approaches have been adopted across the industry (from log-in as evidence to notification/alerts or investigator signature on eCOA data). In general, as per other data sources, oversight for eCOA data should be continual and not once at the end of the study. In addition, oversight activities should be right-sized according to the criticality of the data and protocol requirements for compliance. Evidence of the oversight should be available during the conduct of the trial and enduring for the entire retention period.  The aim of this webinar is to allow participants to share different approaches and any knowledge of current expectations by regulatory inspectors.

Our European meeting of the eClinical Forum took place in Brussels 15-17 May 2019, kindly hosted by Janssen.  The rousing meeting was well attended by members from Actelion, Bayer, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, CRF Bracket, CSL Behring, Eli Lilly, eResearch Technology, Glaxo SmithKline, Idorsia, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Medidata, Merck KGaA, Munich Technical University, Neptunus Data, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Oracle, Orion, Servier, Wega Informatik, ZeinCRO ... and guests Association for Innovative Medicines, ECRIN, and European Patients' Forum.  Meeting participants rated this meeting highly successful once again!