patient monitoring, clinical trials, and microsampling

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) has resulted in great improvement in the experience of both clinicians and patients. Remote monitoring can be used in clinical trials, toxicology studies, and a range of therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) programs.

Using remote technologies paired with online portals, emails and other telecommunications, doctors and clinic staff now have greater ability to easily access patients and deliver a higher quality of healthcare with reduced risks for the patients. Innovations around RPM and TDM cover many health conditions across a wider range of geographical locations than ever before.

The Role of Patient Monitoring in Clinical Trials

Modern approaches to patient monitoring have many advantages in the context of clinical trials. They have the capacity to improve the process by increasing patient retention and engagement, upping enrollment, and improving data collection. Here are some key areas of focus patient monitoring in clinical trials.

• Larger data volumes - Through mobile / remote collection of data, researchers are able to collect larger volumes of data. Having a wide range of results provides a large and reliable sample to test the medication in question. This also increases the accuracy since the sample covers a wide range of the population.
  
  
• Convenience - Most clinical tests require constant monitoring and therefore blood sampling now and then. There has been a need to find convenient ways of obtaining blood from the test subjects while causing as little inconvenience as possible. These are newer, more convenient methods emerging, such as microsampling, by which clinicians are able to obtain blood samples more conveniently, causing less pain.
  
  
• Time & Visibility - Clinicians have better access to closer-to-real-time details of their patients through the patient monitoring mobile devices. This enables them to react in good time to the unexpected results of treatment. They are therefore able to know the side effects of the treatments and address them accordingly.

The Role of Microsampling

As already seen, microsampling offers convenience in many settings that require collection of blood or other biological fluids. In clinical trials, microsampling can encourage better subject recruitment and retention, create a potentially wider recruitment pool, and help facilitators spend more time and effort focused on getting results by allowing subjects to sample remotely. It's economical, effective and, as time goes on, it's going to be a critical part of a decentralized clinical trial design.

More information about remote microsampling for TDM can be found via our Microsampling for Drug Monitoring page.

Image Credits: Trajan, Neoteryx, Shutterstock