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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Rheannin Nelson, a clinician manager at ProPharma, a research consulting organization that’s helped pharmaceutical companies conduct clinical trials since 2001.
Nelson focuses on decentralized clinical trials, which are conducted outside traditional settings like a hospital or research institute and moved to another location such as a patient’s home. In 2022, 87% of ProPharma’s clients planned to use decentralized trials, compared to 28% prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the company found.
Nelson spoke about how these trials work and how nurses can get involved.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How do decentralized trials work?
It actually started off during Covid-19. Obviously, a lot of patients weren’t allowed to go to the hospital because of Covid, which wasn’t great because then companies couldn’t further any clinical trials or clinical research. That pause brought along the idea of performing these clinical trials right there in the patient’s home, which is now called decentralized clinical trials. And I think a lot of clinical research-solution companies are starting to pick that up, and it’s becoming really popular. A lot of pharmaceutical companies now want to utilize decentralized clinical trials just because they have more access to more patients. Everybody’s more into working from home now and doing things remotely.
Many of the clinicians who work on these decentralized clinical trials go into the patient’s home, and it depends on the clinical trial itself, but they can either administer the clinical trial drug or collect data that’s part of the clinical trial, like collecting blood samples, doing vital signs, and reporting any documentation necessary for the clinical trial. It involves skill sets that a lot of nurses actually use in their day-to-day in the hospital setting.
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What’s the best change you’ve made or seen at a place where you’ve worked?
Many of my clinicians are actually nurses and unfortunately, they’re really burnt out from the hospital system and the bedside role as well. They’re wanting a change or wanting something that’s away from the hospital or bedside role while still utilizing their skills and clinical expertise as a nurse. Decentralized clinical trials allow the nurse to still maintain many of the skills that they would perform in a hospital setting but, again, just not having that high pressure system of being in a hospital.
What’s a health tech product or platform that’s made your life easier?
We actually have our own eSource application called Go Clinical, and it’s a documentation tool for data collection for our clinicians to use during decentralized clinical trial visits. It’s a really simple tool that makes documentation very user friendly and super easy to use. I’m really excited about it just because it’s a much simpler version of an electronic medical record that nurses are used to. And so this transition into using our eSource platform is really easy for them to use.