Never before have process efficiencies been more important in clinical research. While the workload of research staff continues to grow, the challenges of keeping study subjects engaged and adherent remain. A large part of running successful research programs is improving the ways day to day tasks are executed.
In this article we’ll explore ways to make your clinical research projects more efficient. It all begins with identifying opportunities to streamline and optimize workflow processes. When your clinical research team is juggling multiple projects and keeping things moving forward, it is easy to become overwhelmed with the demands of effective and compliant study communication.
Researchers know how important clear and consistent communication with participants is to the success of a study. If this falls to the wayside, researchers leave room for participants to forget tasks or lose interest, increasing the risk of disengaging them. With the right tools in your team’s corner, you can bake automation into your processes to make study communication a breeze.
Research Workflow Management and Why It Matters
Maximize the potential of clinical research staff and resources
When clinical research staff are swamped with administrative tasks, this can take their attention away from the work that truly matters. For instance, if there is no real pattern or structure to communication with participants, this can leave clinical researchers in a position where they have to manually write custom updates and responses to each and every participant.
This lack of consistency has the potential to result in compliance issues. To ensure everyone is on the same page, you should implement research workflow management processes to map out study communication. By following a clear set of workflow processes, you can reduce the likelihood of compliance errors and keep clinical researchers focused on the real work.
Improve regulatory compliance and adherence to quality standards
Research workflow management processes inevitably help to improve regulatory compliance and adherence to quality standards. Rather than tackling tasks, such as study communication with participants, on a case-by-case basis, you can standardize communication with workflows. Clearly defined workflow processes should confidently plug any regulatory compliance gaps.
Optimizing Research Workflow Process Tips
Select the right workflows to optimize
To identify the right workflows to optimize, you should strategically consider which workflows come with the greatest output value. In other words, which workflows require optimization to unlock team productivity and keep research staff focused on increasing their collective output? This is an opportunity for the clinical research team to reflect on existing workflow processes.
Identify existing workflow challenges and hurdles
What is holding your clinical research staff back from maximizing productivity and improving regulatory compliance? Unwieldy workflow processes place a strain on clinical research staff and resources. To begin optimizing research workflows, you must understand the key obstacles holding the team back. You can then leverage tools to refine these workflow processes.
How Text Messaging Improves Research Workflow Solutions
To improve research workflows, many teams are choosing to embrace SMS text messaging services. From sending text reminders to study participants to distributing surveys for data collection, there are many different use cases attached to SMS text messaging for clinical research. Teams are eager to capitalize on mobile’s most popular channel: text messaging.
Improve communication workflows
Using a text messaging solution, you can remind study participants of upcoming appointments in a convenient way. As everyone’s phone is often just an arm’s reach away at any given time, you can have confidence in your ability to quickly reach recipients. Unlike email, text messaging comes with instant push notifications on a person’s mobile device – so they never miss a beat.
Increase engagement and compliance
You can leverage automated text messaging solutions to ensure study participants receive the right compliance-related information at the right time. By pre-scheduling messages, you can consciously spread out texts over a period of time and prevent long gaps in communication. This can work as a strategy to maintain participant engagement for the duration of the study.
Reduce manual data entry
Back-and-forth communication via email can lead to mountains of manual data entry tasks for completion. With no easy way to quickly turn email correspondence into usable data, email falls short as a data collection channel for research teams. Text messaging offers a highly practical solution to data collection and enables researchers to collect data in an instantly usable format.
Eliminate repetitive and tedious tasks
If your existing workflows are plagued with repetitive administrative tasks, leveraging a text message service to quickly distribute key information to participants (without having to repeat yourself every time) is a game-changer. You can utilize text message templates to rapidly share important information while using data variables, such as first names, to add customization.
Prevent chasing down participants
Some text messaging solutions can provide administrators with the ability to pre-schedule text messages. Rather than following up with each participant individually for data, you can simply build out an automation process to create a cohesive and coherent communication plan. If you are not getting responses from certain participants, allow automation to do the heavy lifting.
Text Messaging Software Made for Researchers
When it comes to text messaging for researchers, a box-standard solution isn’t going to cut it. You need a purpose-built platform that can account for the nuances of running clinical research studies. This is where Mosio comes into the picture. Mosio is a text messaging solution that is designed specifically for researchers. That’s right, it’s purpose-built to meet your specific needs.
Our text messaging software is built to save researchers time through automated messaging. We recognize the importance of compliance and adherence to quality standards. With this in mind, our platform’s features are developed to ensure you meet regulatory requirements while collecting data and engaging with participants. It’s a match made in heaven for research teams.
Are you ready to get started with Mosio? To get the ball rolling, you can get a free project plan. To learn more about Mosio’s extensive range of useful features for research teams, you can take a browse through our brief breakdown. In terms of covering the immense benefits of our text messaging solution for researchers, we have barely scratched the surface.
