Giving Sites a Seat at the Table - Silvina Baudino

Hello and welcome

to the Totally Clinical podcast brought to you by tekrar guru, Totally Clinical is a deep dive into the freshest trends, big time challenges and most excellent triumphs of clinical trials. I'm Hannah, your host. Join me as I chat with industry experts, trailblazers, thought leaders and, most importantly, the people benefiting from clinical research. So tune in.

Settle back and don't touch that dial. It's time to get Totally Clinical. So,

veena baldino tekrar is director of sight strategy, joins the podcast. This week.

Now, back in October, she joined me to discuss Tetris novel new program for sites. Tech coal-powered and salween has been pretty busy since working with sites to understand their pain points and support them on their technology journey. Sylvie nick, could you update the listeners on what you've been up to for the last couple of months? We have been doing a lot of things with sites and we're very excited for what we have achieved this year and the plans we have for the next year.

So we have been doing different things. One of those has been talking to our users to better understand how they're using to grow, what they would like about tekrar. What they would like to improve for tekrar has been really important to bring the site voice and the user's voice to what we do as we think as a company about new features for our platform is very important to introduce the site voice and to better understand how we can help to make the clinical trial process easier, faster and more efficient for them. On the other hand, we have been talking about tech with our prospective user, the TerraPower sites, to better understand when they are using technology, what they are looking for, which are the pain points they have at their sites, and how they would like to get to know new technology, which is the best timing and which is the best way.

The only way to better understand what sites want is to speak with sites and to listen to them what they have to say. It's interesting because sites

vary in terms of their needs and wants, don't they? So one of the things is that we have been engaging with different sites, type of sites to understand because academia maybe has different needs than the research professional side. But at the end of the day, all of them are conducted clinical trials.

So we need to be sure that what we provide a Thakrar with our platform helps everybody, not just different type of site, but also different personas, different types of sites, staff coordinators, investigators, lab people and also help sites around the world because the needs of each country are different. Nevertheless, we need to be sure that we, our baseline covers all the bases. And we can respond to every site needs. Could

you explain more about some of the work you've been doing with organizations that help sites?

So in addition to our conversations and continue discussion with different type of sites? We have an engaged. We have engaged with some organizations that are really focused on helping sites and clinical research professionals. One of those is the Society of Clinical research sites that has a conference that finally was in-person after two years.

So tekrar was part of that conference. We have a booth and we have the opportunity to really engage in person with sites from different parts of the country or on different parts of North America, which was great after almost two years to do everything in a virtual setting. So we had the opportunity to talk about role and not just about tech, to talk about sites and technology. There were different types of vendors, different type of organizations, so we have the opportunity to exchange information and experiences with different sites.

Some of them were free users and some of them were not. But they were very interested in learning more about what we do and how they can use technology in their clinical trials. And that was a great opportunity. We receive a lot of feedback that we really brought back to our product team.

So to be sure that we take into account all these different feedback and input from different people as we develop new features for our platform.

You've also been working on some webinars, haven't you? One of the things that we have been doing is webinars, different type of webinars with associations, clinical research associations. One of those was with the Society of Clinical research sites, and we discussed with the site about different technologies and bringing the site voice to better understand how sites can evaluate technology that they acquired and how they can work better with the technology that sponsors decide to use for specific trials.

There are so many systems and so many vendors, so helping the sites to go through this journey technology journey and feel more comfortable as they move into the future. We have that and was very well received by sites and very, you know, sites were participating and making questions and help us to better understand where we are at the vendors and how we can help. We are also collaborating with a. Association of clinical research professionals, as I said, we have recently done a blog talking about sites, pain points and what is going on after COVID 19.

With technology adoption. And because sometimes we understand that sponsors think that technology is what sites need, and some of the systems really make sites life more complicated because it's not so easy to adopt the technology because it involves a lot of training and sometimes more steps in a specific process. So it's not just bringing technology to change everything you need to bring technology and different systems when you are helping to facilitate the process and make it simpler. So we need to evaluate when additional systems or technologies are needed because maybe some of the processes should stay at their sites.

Input is very important for whatever we want to develop in the technology space that is for sites to use.

What have been your conclusions from the work you've been doing with these organizations that has been really eye opening for us, and we want to keep this channel of communication open with sites and to hear what they have to say and to provide feedback and input about what are we doing to be sure that we are taking into account their voice as we develop more into the future and we continue growing our platform? We want to be sure that what we do really help them to achieve what they need to conduct clinical trials is not that they just use it and how they use it and how they can improve what they do is integral.

Are they having less protocol deviations? Are they able to enroll more patients because they receive the information they need on time? How they are really managing clinical trials when they use thakrar? These are the things that we are very interested in knowing, and the only way to know is listening to the sites.

So we are very happy that we started this journey and really, given the state of the stakeholder, sit at the table to take into account their voice as we move into the future.

And finally, can you give us a taste of what's to come in? 2022 So we're excited about 2022 because I think that we started. This is the first part of our journey bringing the sides to the table.

And now it's like, we want really to see the power growing next year. And in the years to come. We are finishing our program that is self-administered for states that want to know more about tekrar, but they don't have study with technology yet. So we will be launching the new self-administered training or onboarding because sometimes we feel that when we talk about training sounds like something very complicated.

And Carroo is really self intuitive, is something easy to use, but they want sites to have the opportunity to try to grow before they have an study. So when they get study, they feel comfortable and familiar with our system and they can start using it right away. So we are excited about that. And as I previously mentioned, we are doing to a couple not more than two special projects with academia that we are kicking off early next year.

And we will be able to share next year more information about those projects. And that's your dose of Totally

Clinical. And the last podcast for 2021. You can follow tech wrote on Twitter.

The handle is tekrar official LinkedIn and Facebook and subscribe to our YouTube channel. And, of course, download the Totally Clinical podcast on apple, Spotify and Google. Thanks for listening! See you in 2022.