Challenges in Clinical Research

There are a variety of challenges in clinical research today. While your company does not have control over some of these issues, such as regulations that are put in place, some things, such as data collection, can be streamlined to make your clinical trials more efficient. If you are interested in improving your clinical trials management, then LIMS Solutions could help you. Laboratory Information Management Systems, or LIMS Solutions, emphasize regulatory compliance and controlled methodology. But even with LIMS, there are some challenges that your team might face when conducting your trial. Below are some of the main challenges in clinical research:

Patient Recruitment
Before you even start your clinical trial, you must find patients who fit your predetermined eligibility criteria and get them to participate. If you cannot find the right patients, or if you cannot get the right patients to participate, then you will fail before your clinical research can even begin. Patient education is essential to success in patient recruitment. Clinics and doctors who first see the patients should be informed and educated about the clinical trials taking place, so that they can tell their eligible patients. If many patients are not even aware that there is a clinical trial out there that they are eligible to participate in, then they won’t apply or even consider participating in your clinical trial.

Government Regulations
Government regulations were put in place for a reason, including to protect current patients — who are taking part in your clinical trial — and for future patients — who will use your pharmaceutical drugs in the future. That being said, some of the regulatory requirements for clinical trials can be constraining. Clinical trials must undergo a plethora of reviews, starting internally and working up to federal. Internal review processes can significantly delay the onset and completion of clinical trials. After those are all completed and research is underway, federal review, as well as institutional review board approval, can increase the cost and decrease the efficiency of the clinical trial.

Data Collection
Though data collection in itself is not the most complex part of conducting research, the shrinking workforce of those conducting clinical research has been detrimental to clinical research efficiency. High turnover rates mean that well-trained, intelligent data monitoring is at risk. Though this cannot be fixed entirely without actually incentivizing more clinical investigators to enter the clinical research workforce, LIMS Solutions can at least increase integrated document management and laboratory QC batching with templates. When you incorporate LIMS Solutions into your clinical trials, you can manage your data better, while making following compliance measures that much easier. When you are not worrying about data management, then you can focus on other ways to become more efficient.