Data report analysis
KNect365 recently conducted one of the biggest surveys of its kind of clinical trial professionals asking about the most hyped areas of clinical trials today and whether they are actually impacting the way studies are run. 199 clinical trial professionals from pharma and biotechs (24%), CROs (23%), service providers (21%), consultancies (11%), sites (6%), academia (5%) and patient groups (2%) completed the survey, largely split between North America (55%) and Europe (33%).
A large section of the survey explored the perceptions, implementation, benefits and challenges of mHealth, AI and data technologies. Respondents made it clear that they think these are vital to the future of clinical trials, with 53% placing mHealth or AI as having the biggest impact on clinical trials by 2030. Here we dive into this data to pick out key trends of where the industry is currently at and where it is going with the technology revolution in clinical trials.
Download the full Beyond the Hype in Clinical Trials report here
MHealth technologies are increasingly changing the way clinical trials are run and this is backed up by 79% of respondents who said it was ‘Likely’ or ‘Very Likely’ their company will increase its use of mHealth in the next two years.
However, clinical trials professionals clearly think there is still a lot of work to be done with current integration of this technology. When asked to rate how well their company is currently implementing mHealth technologies on a scale of 1-10 (1 being ‘not at all well’ and 10 being ‘perfectly’), the average score was just 5.69/10. Furthermore, 11% of respondents gave the lowest score of 1/10 in how well their company is implementing mHealth technologies, versus just 3% who said their company was implementing mHealth perfectly.
Interestingly, a split was seen between corporate management respondents who gave an average rating of 6.43 and those working in clinical operations who averaged just 4.89. Also, perhaps unsurprisingly, respondents from service providers and medical device companies feel they are implementing these technologies better than pharma and biotech companies with an average of 6.09 versus 4.91, with CROs sitting in between the two on 5.49.
Of those currently implementing mHealth, mobile apps were the most common form of technology with 56% of respondents, followed by monitoring devices (40%) and activity trackers (30%). Other responses included ePRO, mECG, sleep measurement, voice-based technology, time and date stamp medicine adherence, eLabel, SMS reminders, video observation and “multi-modal communications tailored to patients' preferences”.
Which mHealth technologies has your company used in clinical trials?
There are a variety of potential benefits to using mHealth technologies, but the majority of respondents focused on data generation as the primary advantage, with 42% citing real-time data acquisition and a further 30% on improved data quality.
With the proliferation of clinical data generated by new technologies, it can often seem that companies are drowning in Big Data. However, our survey respondents suggested that in general companies are managing and utilising the data well – giving an average score of 7.27 when asked to rank out of 10.
What is the primary benefit derived from use of mHealth technologies?
On the other side of things, when asked about the primary concern around mHealth, answers were split quite evenly between difficultly in implementation (28%), data security (27%) and patient or physician resistance (20%).
What is your primary concern with the use of mHealth technologies?
Whilst respondents were happy to choose one of the provided options for the benefits of mHealth tech, it is telling that they were far more vocal when given the opportunity to discuss concerns. Answers included:
It’s clear that there are still a number of concerns with the adoption of mHealth, yet the importance of the varying technologies to clinical trials isn’t in doubt. In the report introduction, Citeline succinctly sums up the industry’s perception:
