Mobile Apps for Clinical Trial!
In recent years, mobile apps have revolutionized communication and outreach in every sphere of life. It has given ease, flexibility to sharing information and messaging.
Mobile Apps for clinical research or trials are going to be the dominant technology for the future. At present, this trend is fast catching up as an important outreach and recruitment channel for recruiting and retaining patients.
Mobile apps may be new for clinical trials but these are not new for the patients. People have been using mobile apps for different purposes for a long time. The main objective of clinical research is giving the best treatment to the patients. Therefore, if the right information is made available to the patient through apps, it can benefit everyone.
What does a Clinical Mobile App do? – A clinical mobile app connects patients, physicians and pharmaceutical companies. It provides relevant information to everyone involved.
Increasing patient outreach – Increasing patient outreach can widen the base to include a large number of patients who can be helped through research and information.
Benefits for Physicians –Physicians can also benefit through these apps by getting access to new studies and type of treatments they may need to refer while deciding an optimum line of treatment for any patient.
Measure and analyze –Mobile analytics is the great source to know patient engagement and gives insight to the best way to offer information that will be helpful. The analytical data tells you who viewed the studies, how many enrolled and how many declined. This information can be used to follow up with patients who did not respond by messaging through mobile app through a more personal approach.
An effective process can include the following features.
- Building and effective funnel to identify and inform a participant then recruit the participant.
- Create and utilize an effective tracking procedure to follow up with potential recruits.
- Create a tracking system to follow up with non-responders
Patient Centric App – The success of any outreach or recruitment channel depends on user friendliness. Mobile apps for clinical trials and research are no exception. In fact, if the mobile app is user- friendly in terms of providing information not only the way but in form of content, it can be the most significant way to increase patient outreach and recruitment.
Making the mobile App patient centric?
Here is a list of ways
- Providing real time and up-to-date study information
- Providing notifications of future or upcoming studies.
- Making the setting of study interests and preference criteria easy and possible for users
- Giving users the ability to check their eligibility for a particular study or trial
- Providing users the ability to sign up for any study of their interest
Motivating patients during the study or trial – This is crucial for any successful study or clinical trial. If patients drop out before the completion, the study has to be abandoned. Keeping the patient motivated through the complete duration is challenging. However, the study’s mobile app can play a significant role in achieving the target.
It can
- Help patients to set up study appointments.
- Schedule appointments
- Add medication reminders
- Settingalert not to miss the appointments or missed appointments
- Suggesting alternate times to reschedule in case of missed appointments.
Mobile Apps play a significant role in success of any clinical research, study or trial. Through effective communication and connectivity, everyone feels involved. These mobile apps just need to be user-friendly, simple and easy.
