The Goals and Design of the ACRP “Transformation of the Clinical Research Enterprise” Survey
Just over a year ago, a small team from ACRP and Continuum Clinical got together to discuss developing a new survey of the clinical trial community.
I remember that meeting well, because we were all very excited about the idea.
We had just one challenge we couldn’t quite figure out. One small question: Why?
There were already a lot of surveys in our space. Many of them came out annually. If anything, we agreed, it almost felt like there were too many surveys already. So why on earth would we want to add another one to the mix?
And to be honest, we didn’t end that meeting with a clear answer. We didn’t want to simply add another long series of pie charts to our already chart-cluttered landscape, but we still knew that we wanted to do this. So, we asked another question: If there’s so much out there already, what’s missing?
Susan Landis, ACRP’s Chief Executive Officer, offered the first thought at our next meeting: Almost all industry surveys focused heavily on challenges faced during trial execution. These challenges were well known (Inefficiency! Complexity! Misalignment!), but the surveys usually didn’t offer solutions. The answers to those challenges were left up to the survey authors to editorialize upon.
Susan wanted to flip that. She shared, “Get a different perspective on the problems and challenges we already know we have—could the workforce perspective initiate change?”
Instead of viewing survey respondents as people who we needed to help, Susan called for a survey that let the respondents shape the solution.
We then quickly identified another gap. Many surveys focused exclusively on the here-and-now. And many focused on the specific frustrations experienced by sites. But if we were serious about looking for solutions, we needed a different approach. We needed to:
- Ask participants to think about the big picture. We wanted to know how things had changed over the last decade, and how people saw them changing in the next decade.
- Ask everyone involved in clinical research. And have them answer questions not just about themselves, but about their counterparts and colleagues.
The result of these realizations is the ACRP publication, Voices from the Front Lines: Insights from the Workforce on Transforming the Clinical Research Enterprise—Past, Present, and Future. In it, we ask everyone involved in helping move clinical research forward to reflect on the major trends of the industry and to identify where they feel there is most opportunity to “bend the curve” and create a better, smarter future for clinical trials.
When we released the topline results in April at the ACRP Annual Conference, it immediately generated many robust discussions, and we expect the full report will do the same.
Our biggest hope is that the discussions are becoming broader and more representative of many different perspectives in the industry. Ultimately, the success of the report will depend less on the details of the survey responses and more on its ability to help ensure those perspectives continue to have a platform to be heard—and to initiate change.
Author: Paul Ivsin, EVP, Clinical Trial Strategy, Continuum Clinical
