Strength in Numbers. Site Success through a "Teckro Powered" Community - Silvina Baudino

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to the Totally Clinical podcast brought to you by tech 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. This

week, so veena baldino joins me on the podcast to discuss tech Cruz, a novel news site program tetro powered to help increase adoption of modern site practices. Sylvana brings more than 20 years of clinical trial industry experience. Her career has encompassed a range of responsibilities.

This includes innovative, site centric delivery models and strategies to improve quality and accessibility to trials for patients globally. Silvana, welcome to the podcast. To start, could you give the listeners an overview of tech powered to grow up? Our program is really around site that value clinical research.

We build a technology ready brand, so we want sites to be ready to embrace technology. They are sites that have been trained on track, or they feel comfortable with TechCrunch. They are ready to go where we think that this network will bring to sites and will bring to the community really in clinical research is expand also physician participation in research because there is a community of research side that is open to collaborate and advising the industry and maybe sites there feel that clinical research is so complicated. When we facilitate them conducting clinical trials and the clinical trial process, they will be more inclined to adopt technology and to participate in clinical trials.

And when we expand physician participation, we expand really patient outreach that is at the end. Our ultimate goal. So this will really help

trials embrace modern site practices and improve engagement. Effective engagement really begins with awareness of the need and challenges of the different sites, different type of sites and not just decide the different staff roles at those sites.

We need to understand their papers and how we can help them to do their work better. So when research staff has immediate access to accurate answers in their daily work. And they have the right guidance, they can really focus on what is important that they recruit the right patients and faster, improve the timelines, the time to resolve the issues they have. They can increase the participant safety because they have the information they need, and I think that really can help the sites to simplify the clinical trial process and achieve these goals.

For that reason, we say that sites need to be empowered and we like them to be TerraPower. This is where this is coming from. We really need to help the sites. We need to be sure that our platform, what we are offering insight is what they need to conduct the clinical trials in a better and safer, and faster way.

And they communicate better with sponsors, not just about context, it's communication and is trust. This is the main point here is to build trust with the sites. We want their input, how they're using our technology and how we can empower them. So battery-powered really

fills a gap in the industry.

To put this in perspective. Could you expand on some of the biggest challenges sites currently face when it comes to managing clinical trials? We are moving into the future. We know that the future of technology and believe it or not.

The biggest challenge and the sites are facing is still administrative burden. It's rather that there is new technology. There are new software system that were created to facilitate the administrative work in clinical trials. However, some of them are equally or even more complex than the previous model processes.

The reality is that if sites are required to use technology because is faster, but it's not simpler, it can create the same or more workflow than before. Some of the new digital processes might even take longer than the old minor ones. That is really not helpful for science. New technology adoption, implementation involves training and learning, which means time.

So it's very important that this is really useful and help with the site challenges in the way they provide real support and improve site performance. It's not a secret that clinical trials complexity is increasing every day across the robotics area, and for that reason, sites need more time to identify the patient population that now is very targeted, and also to conduct the clinical trial processes that are more and more time consuming. For that reason is really crucial to consider all clinical trials, stakeholders' needs and challenges to make a decision when we want to implement new technology in need to help everyday

so TerraPower can really help address these challenges.

Could you expand a bit more on the idea of tech grow as a hub? So the idea is that how we help, how we support sites in different ways from the different aspects we support with content and we support with communication and visibility. So we really want to provide sides with a solution and support to not just resolve problems with content when they have questions and look at the protocol or the study documents in a different way, but also to access to the different stakeholders of the protocol in a faster and more efficient way through our platform. But we also want to create a community.

So because we see such sites are facing similar problems in terms of technology adoption when they are looking to adopt new systems, new software. So we want to be sure that sites can count with each other to share experiences and to better understand the best way to evaluate technology and to make decisions about which technology they want to use when it comes to their site technology, and also how they can be better prepared to work and engage with technologies that are provided by sponsors or zeros. So I think we think that really collaboration is something that we would like to foster is between not just among the sides of the community, but also with the other stakeholders that are the sponsors and CROs.

We think that the community is what will really help everybody to move forward and to have a better clinical trial process that at the end we all have. The ultimate goal is the safety of the patient and to bring patients in New treatment options

and sponsors will also benefit from this new program, won't they? Could you explain more about this sponsor will benefit about this because one of the struggles, as I said for sites, is to adopt new technologies and for sponsors. When they decide to include some technology or different systems in their clinical trials, they want to ensure that the sites are OK with that.

They adopt the technology and they're engaged with it. So how we can benefit sponsors with thicker power sites is really with early engagement. If we can engage with sites and they know about ticagrelor and they know how to use their and create their accounts in advance when the time comes and they have a protocol clinical study that is integral. They will really embrace it because they know the system.

They know how can our platform help their workload on a daily basis instead of feeling that this additional burden when they are trying to learn about a lot of systems and different processes when the state is ready to start. So we are facilitating the process to sponsors and also to series because cras are many times the trainers for the sites for new technology. So this is something that they will not have to be concerned at the time that they are starting the study because sites are already trained and they are already familiar with the technology. So there will not be any roadblocks there in terms of embracing our platform.

So sponsors like that. And on the other hand, we can provide sponsors before they start to trial the names of the sites that are part of Carroo. So they know that these are technology savvy sites that they are training our technology and they are ready to go. It's the concept really of site readiness instead of add additional burden during a very stressful moment for sites, help them being ready in advance.

And

finally, what are your long term ambitions for the program? We are starting to engage inside is really to build a community. For now, we are going from different sites and talking to them. They can use the technology and provide feedback and they are ready to go.

But I really my long term vision is to create a community that we can create focus groups and in a more organized way to provide that, continue opening the communication channel between our product developers and the sites. So there is this continuous exchange of ideas when it comes to move forward with our product, really taking into account what they need and seeing the evolution. So maybe there are things that we are not thinking about right now that could be additional features that we can have in our platform. But because we don't have that feedback, we are not thinking about it is going on.

This is happening with sponsors too, but we need to be sure that we listen to the sides to hear what they have to say and what they have to propose. We understand that sometimes we cannot comply with all the requests, but at least to listen. And maybe this year there are some things that we cannot do in the short term, but we can do in a long term. It's like evolve together.

It is my vision for the future of tekrar power. Thank you, Sylvia,

for explaining more about tech powered and how both sites and sponsors will benefit from this new community to help sites get technology ready and boost adoption of up to date trial practices. And that's your dose of Totally Clinical for all the listeners out there. You can follow her on Twitter.

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