Advocates for Efficiency

Health Decisions is no stranger to the CRO world, having been around for the past 19 years. What also isn’t new is their approach to clinical trial and program management, which is based on efficiencies, tools, metrics and good project management. What is new is their global CRO partnership network, which seeks to bring its Agile Clinical Development to the front of drug development.

Last week, Health Decisions announced that KLIXAR, an Argentina-based CRO, had joined its Agile Clinical Network. That means that KLIXAR has adopted Health Decision’s technologies and processes, as well as taking the time to invest in online and hands-on education, to become a certified partner.

Rick Farris, COO at Health Decisions, told me that the company started exploring this partnership idea in the summer and thought long and hard about the model. Specifically to be addressed was the training process, the certification, how to bid on projects, and more. “We wanted the network to have a single interface with the sponsor,” explained Farris. So to achieve that, Health Decisions built the technology into the bid process so that partners can be involved upfront. 

Certification, however, doesn’t mean exclusivity. All of the Agile Clinical Network members are allowed to contract outside of the network. And there are no fees attached to members. 

Farris believes the Agile Clinical Network model is important for all players in the industry looking to gain efficiencies—from VCs, to small pharma to large pharma. “Part of it is helping our partners think about how our technology makes us more efficient,” said Farris. “If one task, clinical monitoring is 25% to 30% of the total bid, and we can reduce that with interim monitoring visits, that’s significant.” 

Klixar is just the first of a few more partners Health Decisions should be ready to announce in the next six weeks. Partners-in-training are located in Russia and the surrounding Eastern Europe, as well as Middle Europe and South Africa. “We are looking for partners in Western Europe, as well as China and Japan,” said Farris.

Don’t confuse Agile Clinical Development with adaptive trials, which is what I did. While Health Decision does offer protocol design services and has a very strong biostatistics department that can bear on an adaptive design trial, agile and adaptive in this sentence are synonyms. “We have adaptive operations that can be used on any kind of trial, adaptive or traditional,” explained Farris. “It’s the idea of knowing what’s going on [in your trial and programs] as early as possible.”