Harbor Clinical Blog

Each organization has its processes and methodologies on how to vet critical decisions among its stakeholders. The criteria used for decision making are typically well defined and understood. Crisply allowing a good comparison of the options or trade space to have the decision be more apparent to the stakeholders requires some planning and creativity. This blog focuses on such techniques that may be useful to apply in Clinical Studies to make for a more engaging and efficient decision-making process. A brief introduction on the techniques is discussed and a relevant example on application of these techniques follows.

In every organization regardless of industry, team meetings are a big part of a normal work day/week. Meetings are critical to ensure adequate communication across team members, especially in today’s environment with a highly diversified workforce that operate in multiple locations. It is certainly a common experience that some meetings are not as efficient as others and some are downright not worth the time spent at them! This blog focuses on some useful approaches for conducting effective meetings, specifically in a clinical study.

Earned Value Management (EVM) techniques are commonly used as a disciplined process to track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Cost and Schedule. Typically for long duration projects which may span several major subprojects, these techniques can be extremely useful to gauge the team’s ability to adhere to a cost budget or a critical timeline for the project. A clinical study is a classic use case for applying EVM techniques as there are major subprojects within the project spanning different resource types. Additionally, the monetary value of clinical studies ranging from ~$5M in a phase 1 trial to exceeding $100M for a Phase 3 trial offer the opportunity to realize substantial financial savings through crisp execution using KPIs as benchmarks through the study.