Monday, August 15, 2022

Why research sites need an advanced clinical trial management system

It’s no secret that clinical research sites and staff are being asked to do a lot. On top of managing patients and fielding calls from PIs, sponsors and others, site staff must also manage visit activities, data entry, records, budgets, contracts and more for multiple studies at once. It’s no wonder why ensuring data quality, synchronicity and budget consciousness can be a daunting task.

So how do we organize the chaos?

Enter: the clinical trial management system (CTMS), a site-centric solution that can support many challenges today’s research organizations face.

What is a CTMS?

A CTMS is software that connects, organizes and simplifies the many aspects of research site operations. The best CTMS systems can seamlessly work together to connect data from other software and tools, such as EHRs, regulatory eBinders, patient payment systems and more.

Verily Viewpoint Site CTMS (formerly SignalPath by Verily) is changing the game for CTMS solutions because it’s been designed by researchers, for researchers. By removing the burden of juggling multiple files and systems, Verily Viewpoint Site CTMS optimizes research site operations with visibility and tracking, enabling high-quality data collection that can power more precise research analyses.

What features allow a CTMS to improve research workflows?

An advanced CTMS enables research coordinators and staff to manage all study visits and activities, all in one place. It can take on the burden of tedious work, while easing coordination costs.

Digitize and Organize

Site CTMS leverages the latest in protocol digitization technologies to transform complex study protocols into simple, automated study workflows. As a result, clinical research coordinators no longer have to spend hours analyzing and configuring complex protocols to arrange study workflows in homegrown or outdated legacy systems.

And with Site CTMS, staff can quickly pull and reference key visit activities for each protocol and research participant, ensuring compliance and safety for every person and study. Research teams can also easily find information and instructions around inclusion and exclusion criteria, randomization and other critical protocol-defined events.

Analyze and Prioritize for Flexibility

For research organizations managing a portfolio of studies, it can be difficult to analyze and apply learnings that improve research site performance. As an advanced solution, Site CTMS gathers key site performance metrics, which helps teams identify any backlogs and prioritize their efforts to manage resources effectively.

Research leads and management can view metrics such as patient enrollment, deadlines and milestones across all studies for their site. This allows research administrators to proactively manage trials and risks across the portfolio instead of wasting time consolidating spreadsheets, or combining data from different sources to create reports for leadership.

In other words, a CTMS is an empowering tool for research teams to know what aspects of research operations need the most attention and adjust resources as needed to best support their team.

How does a CTMS manage and track revenue and profits?

Keeping study finances in order is crucial to the success of research site operations and performance. Luckily, Site CTMS has advanced features to help you maximize research revenue and profitability with precision.

Streamline your pre-award process

Budget preparation and analyses are critical to ensuring research sites maximize their study payments and budgets from sponsors. However, this activity can be a time-consuming. Financial tools within a CTMS that facilitate Medicare Coverage Analysis, billing calendar and budget creation can greatly streamline this process.

Site CTMS also features budget analysis tools that can provide detailed insights into revenue and cost drivers for each study, such as analyzing how changes in participant enrollment and dropout rates impact the bottom line.

Real-time tracking and billing

Tracking and billing for invoiceable activities in real-time are critical to ensure that sites receive all payments they’ve worked so hard to negotiate for in the pre-award process. Real-time capture of visit and activity completion within Site CTMS across both coordinator and financial workflows reduces coordination costs between these teams, and allows sites to track and bill for activities and milestones in real-time to facilitate accurate and timely payments.

Visualize site profitability


Seeing where your money comes and goes takes on a new meaning with Site CTMS advanced financial reporting dashboards and filters. Other than quickly producing multiple views of revenue, costs and profitability,Site CTMS offers simplicity — no more juggling or reviewing multiple outdated spreadsheets, documents and systems to assess your study or site’s monetary health. Now, you can leverage a single source of financial truth and eliminate the need for ancillary systems with a CTMS that tracks all revenue opportunities across routine care and sponsor payments, while highlighting sources of bad debt.

How can a CTMS eliminate redundant tasks?

Time-consuming, redundant and manual tasks plague both the productivity and sanity of research teams. Not only that, but syncing work and data across different systems and logins further burdens staff.

Because Site CTMS was designed by researchers, it’s intuitive to use AND integrates with leading eClinical technologies so sites can maximize their existing technology ecosystem. By allowing organizations to integrate their CTMS with current systems, sites preserve investments and prevent duplicative data entry and processes. In this way, an advanced CTMS can maximize data quality and productivity by being a one-stop-shop for managing every aspect of research operations.

While many software options have aimed to help ease different aspects of research operations, Site CTMS is one of the most advanced solutions for enterprise research sites in market.


Learn more about how numerous research organizations, both large and small, are already using Verily Viewpoint Site CTMS to improve the ease, efficiency and quality of research.