When clinical studies last a long time, the disparity in which clinical sites progress through the trial becomes more apparent: some sites progress quickly and will exhaust their pool of patients rapidly, running out of new patients to enrol and switching to study closure in a few years, while other site may keep enrolling for much longer and will stay open after other sites have closed. These disparities in site status can lead to potential difficulties for clinical project managers in collecting and managing the right patient’s data at the right time.
Moreover, when a site no longer has patients (because all the visits are over), but the trial is continuing for several other sites, the eCOA provider’s study data managers and programmers must perform all the relevant data management and data closing activities for the relevant site only; for this to happen, they must be precisely aware of the status of all sites and patients. This is not always the case, since project management teams at eCOA service providers are very dependent on the speed at which information on the status of patients and sites is shared with them. These teams need to obtain information from sites very quickly, which can be particularly difficult when sites are out of patients.