Why Aren’t More Pharmaceutical Companies Using Mobile Technologies in Clinical Trials?

Without clinical trials, pharmaceutical companies lack an effective way to test the effectiveness of drugs. However, clinical trials are costly and lengthy. What can be done to make them shorter and less expensive? One solution is to implement mobile technologies. They offer a number of benefits to pharmaceutical companies as well as patients.

Yet, research shows many pharmaceutical companies aren’t taking advantage of these technologies. Read on to learn about the barriers to implementing mobile technologies in pharmaceutical firms’ clinical trials, and how they can be overcome.

The Research

In early 2016, SCORR Marketing and Applied Clinical Trials conducted a survey about attitudes towards wearable technology within clinical trials. Respondents hailed from sponsor companies, clinical research organizations, academia, service providers, consultancies, hospitals, and research sites.

Researchers asked participants about whether the positives of wearable technologies outweigh the negatives, and 95% said yes. Yet the adoption rates of wearable technologies within clinical trials remain low. Why is that?

Nearly 40% of survey respondents believe that pharmaceutical companies are the most resistant to implementing wearable technologies in clinical trials. More tellingly, 43% of participants from pharmaceutical companies claimed their employers were the most reluctant to use wearable technologies in clinical trials.

Pharmaceutical Companies’ Barriers to Implementing Wearable Technologies in Clinical Trials

There are a few reasons as to why pharmaceutical companies have not embraced the use of wearable technologies (or many other mobile technologies) within clinical trials.

Pharmaceutical firms are concerned about the cost of wearable technologies, which partially explains why they are less inclined to use them in clinical trials. Clinical trials are already quite costly. A report submitted to the US Department of Health and Human Services in July 2014 examined the expenses of carrying out a clinical trial. Researchers determined that some of the priciest components of clinical trials are site monitoring costs.

Mobile technologies would actually reduce site monitoring costs, because they could gather data remotely and patients wouldn’t come to the site as frequently for data collection. There are most certainly affordable mobile and wearable technologies on the market that would be suitable for clinical trials, so the argument that they are too expensive is not supported by evidence.

Another factor holding pharmaceutical companies back from implementing more mobile technologies in clinical trials is patient compliance. Pharmaceutical firms worry that if patients aren’t on site to participate in clinical trials, they will not follow the protocols properly. However, the argument can be made that compliance rates might actually rise with the use of mobile devices. Many patients use some kind of mobile device on a daily basis, so they feel very comfortable with them. And wearable devices do not require a great deal of effort to use on the patient’s part.

The third factor affecting the use of mobile technologies in clinical trials is data security. This is the most difficult issue to address, because mobile security challenges face every industry. However, it is not worth rejecting mobile technologies because of security risks. Pharmaceutical companies must make digital security a top priority in clinical trials so that they will reap the benefits of mobile technologies.