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Exostar was excited to be part of the 6th Annual SCOPE Europe Summit in Barcelona, Spain, and pleased to address the most pressing tech challenges facing the clinical operations community, while learning a lot about the day-to-day struggles faced by the Sponsor study teams as more technology gets introduced into clinical trials. At the event, our team connected with clinical innovation leaders from many countries.  

Day 1: Presenting The Importance of Speed to Access  

I had the pleasure of speaking during the Feasibility, Site Selection and Study Activation track at the conference. Our presentation about Speed to Access addressed exactly how empowering the typical clinical site user in the way they access their suite of clinical apps can be a powerful component of optimizing site performance, and an often overlooked extension of the site activation area of the clinical trial process. 

Discussing Current Life Sciences Industry Challenges  

We often hear from industry peers that lengthy onboarding processes, complex credential management due to application volume, and poor user experience are among the top pain points. This results in a growing problem because: 
– There is a shortage of clinical site staff, especially after Covid.
– The number of clinical apps being used across studies has grown exponentially.  
– Many users work on more than one study at a time, which multiplies the complexity and number of access points. 

Heads were nodding as we described the problem of too many applications, staff limitations, and a plethora of passwords, in today’s clinical trial process. Many audience members were familiar with the day-to-day challenge of users juggling an inordinate number of passwords as they perform their daily functions, requiring assistance on getting logged back in from a lost password – or twenty. Not to mention, a hugely cumbersome app onboarding process that must be duplicated for each study. We shared some stats that were clearly eye opening to the crowd on how pervasive the problem is and the magnitude which is shocking when you add the numbers up. The upshot was this has an enormous impact on the productivity of your clinical sites, globally, whether you know it or not.

Attendees Shared Pain Points at the Tradeshow Booth  

There was a lot of excitement, and I could tell we hit a nerve with what we talked about. We heard these common pain points multiple times at the Exostar booth:  

“We’re still doing it the old-fashioned way…there’s got to be a better way.”  

“We could be way more efficient with a real SSO for our sites.” 

Fortunately, we were able to sketch out the solution to a challenge that turns out to be the number #1 reported problem by clinical trial sites.  

Several sponsors we met with echoed the above issues. While it’s true that Single Sign-On (SSO) can have an impact, the true need is SSO built for the Life Sciences community to have an impact. I think we had to explain that to folks even after we made this a key point of our presentation earlier. It’s not enough to have SSO but what makes it such a gamechanger is the Community you can leverage behind it.  

Why? Well, a key bottleneck in the study startup and activation phase is the user onboarding. Patient recruitment, trial management, EDC, and so on, need the user to be onboarded individually. In the typical scenario, each app takes 7-10 minutes per app, per study; many of these users are on multiple studies and each study may have a dozen or more apps. So doing the math, it gets ugly really fast.  

The smarter way is a one and done approach where you connect everybody through a single login/password for everything you need. That step alone will eliminate time wasted by 7x approximately.  

However, to achieve the kind of gains we’re trying to achieve for sponsors you need something else up your sleeve: the community.  

Exostar’s Secure Access Manager (SAM) is Not Just SSO  

Our unique community includes 650K+ Life Sciences users already connected to the most popular clinical applications. In fact, there are over 100 applications and that number keeps growing. Users can be immediately productive and avoid traditional SSO onboarding, resulting in greater site satisfaction and speed to market. 30,000+ sites worldwide find immediate value in the Exostar community by accelerating study start-up. 

How Does Exostar’s SAM Impact Clinical Trial Sponsors?  

Chances are the person you need to onboard is an existing Exostar user and may already be associated with one of your sites. In that case, onboarding is reduced to one minute.  

The thing to remember is that clinical trial users must login to seven programs on average, leading to a loss of 49 minutes for each study (7 minutes per app to setup). 

Therefore, for many users we provide a 49x time savings versus their preexisting process.  

This fact alone is why we’re proud to have half of the top 20 Pharma leaders as clients.  

There are many more reasons that we heard sponsors and other life science names at the event speak to. A big thing was security. It’s a fact that one exposure to a data breach can be multimillion dollar event for a pharmaceutical company. I agree, it’s incumbent on sponsors to reduce risk by minimizing the number of passwords that external collaborators have to use these days.  There were others factors that folks brought up that makes me think we have the next topic for the series.

Day 2: Reflecting on Insights from Users and Leaders at Life Sciences Companies

As we wrapped up a successful event, I paused to reflect on a couple takeaways from the various presentations and comments from participants.  

1. There is a software tool available now with a solution to almost any problem in the clinical trial space, based on the number of technology vendors and consultants we saw and conversed with. It was exciting to witness innovation in action at SCOPE Europe.
2. Many individuals representing sponsors were looking to expand their trials geographically and navigating ways to support trials in complex environments, as well supporting decentralized trials. At the same time, they have the task of ensuring adequate patient participation and data integrity which becomes more complicated with those goals. Challenges will continue and we’ll undoubtedly need more technology tools in response.  

In the end, you could say things are getting more demanding and complex for clinical operations, but that leads to growth and continued innovation. I’d love to continue the conversation and learn more about your perspective in the Life Sciences world.  

Schedule a time to speak with me directly – looking forward to it! 

Also, I invite you to learn how Exostar’s SAM can help revolutionize your clinical trials as the only SSO solution that combines subject matter expertise, vertical market experience, and broad acceptance in the Life Sciences industry.  

You’re also welcome to contact our team of experts anytime. It will be our pleasure to conduct an analysis and show how our unique SAM community can help you.