TiER1 Performance Note: This article appeared in October 2024 issue of LTEN’s Focus on Training magazine.
The nature of clinical trials is evolving as life sciences organizations seek to improve the quickness and efficiency of the clinical trial process. Not only does an efficient clinical trial process reduce costs, but it also ensures organizations can secure regulatory approval and provide life-changing medicine to patients more quickly, ultimately helping improve patient outcomes. Outpacing competitors requires a proven process for conducting clinical trials in a safe, replicable, and scalable way that will quickly and efficiently produce accurate, timely data that informs the efficacy of a new medicine.
Life sciences organizations must ensure that everyone involved in clinical trials understands their part. This includes educating site staff on the critical components of the medicine and equipping them with the right tools to conduct trials, as well as teaching patients what data to upload and when and how to do so. Thus, conducting clinical trials in a safe, replicable, and scalable way requires thinking about training differently. Here are three key training-related considerations to ensure your next clinical trial is a success.
An effective learning strategy is key to educating various audiences on different content (e.g., the teams managing and organizing clinical trials, site staff conducting clinical trials, and patients participating in clinical trials). Avoid overwhelming learners with too much training at the start of the trial. Instead of dumping all the information on them at once, deliver content in phases and moments, prioritizing the most critical information learners need to know—when they need to know it—based on their unique role and tasks. (We’ll dive deeper into this in the next consideration.)
An important aspect of developing an effective learning strategy is considering the type of learning platform needed to deliver the training. Although a single platform may not meet all learner needs, it’s important to understand how different platforms can improve the learning ecosystem. Explore the differences between top learning platforms in this article on Finding the Right Learning Platform for Your Company.
As clinical trials progress, site staff and patients may experience challenging situations that require additional learning interventions. Whether these challenges were anticipated or not, it’s important to respond immediately by modifying or supplementing the existing training. Waiting until a formal protocol amendment is implemented isn’t necessary. Providing additional support can take many forms depending on the need and could be as simple as sharing a reminder or providing a new job aid.
Start by identifying the various audience groups that need to be trained on the trial. Then identify the critical information each audience needs to know based on their unique roles and tasks and map out when they need to know this information. Providing on-the-job training and performance support in the moment rather than all at once up front allows learners to better absorb and recall the information the next time they experience a similar situation. Understanding what an audience needs to know and when they need to know it versus what they already know is also crucial as it reduces time spent creating and delivering unnecessary training.
It’s equally important to consider both the modality and frequency of training based on an audience’s unique learning objectives. If a learning objective impacts the success of capturing accurate and timely data or participant safety, for example, emphasize this information in training with greater frequency and provide different modalities for learners to consume the information when it’s most relevant to their role and tasks.
While diversity, equity, and inclusion should be top of mind throughout the entire trial process, consider accessibility within the context of your audiences and how they will access and consume training materials and support. For example, a patient with poor eyesight may use a screen reader to consume training materials. It’s important to design content with the diverse needs of all audiences and individual learners in mind.
Even though treatment indications vary by trial, there are content and training components that are similar for every clinical trial process (e.g., how to use devices and how to conduct labs). To provide a repeatable, scalable approach to conducting clinical trials, establish a core team or department that’s aligned on best practices for the creation and delivery of training materials. Having a core team focused on content creation and delivery ensures that all trial sites use the same materials when applicable, which reduces unnecessary time and money spent on recreating assets for every new trial. A core team also creates consistency for how sites deliver training, which ensures that learners experience a similar training process for every trial, ultimately shortening their time to proficiency. Using consistent content creation and delivery methods enables your core team to invest more time into customizing materials for new audiences and scaling the trial.
By embracing training as an ongoing opportunity to support your learners, delivering critical content in phases with the right frequency and modality based on your learners’ unique needs, and creating a core team to hone and scale your approach, you’ll establish a solid foundation for conducting efficient clinical trials. Your people are key to make this kind of large-scale change stick. It’ll require mindset shifts, organizational alignment, and comprehensive and ongoing change, learning, communications, and performance support strategies, all of which will impact your people’s ability to adopt, implement, and champion your new approach. We’d love to partner with you to activate this strategy through your people so you can gain regulatory approval for new medicines and improve patient outcomes even faster.