Is training slowing your study?
Sponsors and sites alike want to reduce activation timelines, keep investigators engaged, and start seeing patients sooner. Standardized training helps do this, leading to consistent and reliable outcomes with minimal effort. An ideal system would support role-based and task-based training assignments and provide external training documentation management.
But training practices are far from ideal. Training is frequently redundant, disorganized and not trackable. Such issues delay study startup, costing sponsors money, frustrating sites and even putting participants at risk.
1. Training Often Increases Site Burdens
Sites face crippling staffing shortages, increasingly complex protocols, and the need to quickly integrate new technologies. Training should alleviate, not aggravate, these pressures. Too often, it doesn’t.
Sites, pressed for staff and time, need access to targeted, role-specific or task-driven training modules that are easily available.
Today, advanced training technologies store, track, and manage training. They allow study teams to monitor site training and activate sites in a timely and compliant manner. This investment supports efficient site activation; it also maintains compliance as new site staff are brought on board and allows existing staff the opportunity to refer to the training should questions arise.
To lighten the site burden, the right training system:
- Systematizes routine administrative training processes.
- Provides real-time monitoring and customizable training pathways based on expertise.
- Streamlines the training process and offers accessible on-demand training.
- Supports compliance by ensuring documentation is consistently available.
- Automates workflows to create efficiency for investigators, CRAs, and the rest of the study team.
Sponsors and CROs can create robust, customized training pathways for each researcher. Meanwhile, automated workflows increase efficiency, reduce redundancy, improve participant safety, and ensure audit preparedness.
InvestigatorSpace® provides clear training assignments and tracking— simplifying reporting and improving clinical trial performance. This eases the burden on sites, enabling them to see the first patient up to 55 days faster, leading to significant cost savings. In addition, InvestigatorSpace Mobile allows investigators to launch and monitor training from any mobile device.
2. Training Can Be Redundant
Raters, investigators, and site teams often must repeat training they already completed for a previous trial, leading to frustration and wasted resources. What’s needed is a streamlined process that ensures everyone receives credit for prior training.
Choosing a training program that delivers consistent training content and maintains prior rater training certifications saves investigators valuable time.
InvestigatorSpace facilitates cross-sponsor and cross-study system exemptions, which can cut redundant training. For example, a mutually recognized training exemption auto-exempted 44% of site staff in a three-study program.
Raters can enter their qualifications, including academic degree, experience, and the number of times they’ve administered certain scales. This will establish their qualification status and determine their customized training path and exemptions.
- Personalized Training Paths: With automated exemptions based on accessible, role-based, and task-specific trainings.
- User-Friendly Interface: The right platform—with single sign-on–can simplify the process of self-registration for sites involved in multiple studies.
- Efficiency: Reductions in the time and costs associated with training certification reconciliation.
3. Audit Readiness is Essential
As protocols become more complex, so do clinical trial regulations and requirements. Sponsors must keep records of who has completed training, when they completed it, and any subsequent retraining. This administrative aspect can be cumbersome, especially for large trials.
InvestigatorSpace cuts through this, providing training reports and certificates on demand for expected and unexpected audits:
- Automated workflows and data integrity ensure preparedness.
- Real-time updates mean that training and safety documentation are always ready for inspection, mitigating compliance risk.
- Global compliance: With training protocolsand safety regulations for more than 125 countries, InvestigatorSpace helps sponsors manage evolving global requirements.
4. Communication Delays Can Complicate Training
Clear, structured, timely and targeted dissemination is critical not just for training, but all aspects of a clinical trial.
Typically, however, communication is slow and repetitive, and it’s conducted through time-consuming manual processes. Sites and investigators often don’t get the crucial information they require. Sometimes, information is disseminated too broadly, resulting in redundant or unnecessary communication.
By giving sponsors a way to automatically distribute essential communication, InvestigatorSpace powers timely, targeted, and structured dissemination of information.
- Real-time access to reports: The reporting dashboard lets sponsors see how many investigators and sites are compliant, when they last logged on, and who still needs to acknowledge what.
- Centralized resource access: InvestigatorSpace centralizes essential study documents, including the trial protocol, within the Study Home and Communication Resource Center. This resource center not only offers one-way distribution of non-training related resources but also promotes continuous site engagement throughout the study’s duration.
The platform centralizes all training-related data, allowing for a unified space where all training criteria — assignments, retraining, and certificate issuances — are centralized, promoting efficiency and clarity. It automates the distribution, collection, and maintenance of all training documentation.
Conclusion: Create a More Efficient Process
Sponsors and CROs want to prioritize effective and efficient training methods; they just need the right tools. WCG’s InvestigatorSpace is one such solution. It harnesses technology to ease the training burden, eliminate redundancies and ensure audit preparedness.
Sponsors can deploy standardized and scalable training in as little as five days. Amendment training can be completed in just 24 hours. As a result, sites go live an average of 20 days faster. Moreover, because WCG customizes training solutions from basic training to a highly produced production studio, sponsors can reduce the time they spend developing training assets by up to 90%.
WCG’s InvestigatorSpace® trial portal expedites and simplifies the training process, from initial setup to customized training, monitoring, and documentation. Learn more about InvestigatorSpace’s high-tech, high-touch, hands-on technology solutions. Request a consultation today.