HEALTHCARE ENTERPRISE: Virtual Clinical Solutions Offers Secure Online Training on Nashville Medical News

HEALTHCARE ENTERPRISE: Virtual Clinical Solutions Offers Secure Online Training

By: SHARON H. FITZGERALD

This demonstration screen from a Virtual Clinical Solutions webcast illustrates how investigators for clinical trials are trained in an online environment.

Clinical Trials Investigators Enjoy the Convenience

To save money and time, pharmaceutical companies and clinical research organizations are turning to Nashville-based Virtual Clinical Solutions, one of just a handful of companies nationwide that specializes in training clinical trials investigators remotely.

“They have to train all the investigators around the world, and they used to fly them to one location and have an investigators meeting,” explained VCS President Dale Jackson. Not only was that an expensive proposition, it took investigators away from their practices and laboratories. “Now we train them virtually,” he said. “We do everything we can to make it the best learning experience that we can.” The result is increased attendance over face-to-face meetings.

A privately held company, VCS uses a variety of platforms to connect the investigators via the Internet wherever they are in the world. “We either do a live webcast to train them, or we capture content any time before the study’s kicked off, and they can take the training online,” Jackson said. VCS has experience linking investigators in more than 65 countries.

With about 15 employees, VCS acts as a training facilitator and, as Jackson put it, as a “delivery mechanism” for the education sessions and materials needed by each investigator involved in a particular clinical trial. “People usually think of video, but our live webcasts are not video. They’re really just the audio and the slides most of the time. You just have presenters speaking, and they move their slides or show a demonstration,” Jackson described. “If people have a camera, we allow them to use their camera, and you’ll see a picture of the person speaking in the upper left-hand corner.”

VCS bids to facilitate a meeting, and once a bid is won, a project manager guides the team through the process and remains in contact with the client. Assistant project managers work with the sites to plug them in and ensure that Live Meeting software is successfully downloaded to each participant’s computer. “Their job is to make the sites happy,” Jackson said. “The key to our company is how good our people are at creating a quality product. I’m not selling software, I’m selling customer service.”

For each event, services provided by the VCS team include:

invitations, reminders and outbound calls to attendees,
online and telephone support throughout the event,
recording of the session for future training,
documentation of site number and group attendee information,
operator-assisted phone services for attendees,
live question-and-answer opportunities and text chat,
streaming video, annotations, application sharing and polling questions,
post-event reporting to verify individual or group attendance,
simultaneous language translation for global attendees,
secure meeting entry, and
a unique user account and password for each attendee.

“The most important parts of our business are security, confidentiality and the high level of expectations of our customers,” Jackson said.

That’s why VCS managers offer support to presenters to ensure that they are ready before the training day. The presenters are involved in an event rehearsal – and sometimes more than one – to work out any kinks and make sure all technology is compatible. The VCS meeting facilitator greets the presenters half an hour prior to the event and helps them with technical issues and last-minute changes. A post-event meeting with the presenters is held, too.

The investigators, first and foremost, learn the trial’s protocols, in addition to GCPs (good clinical practices), drug distribution strategies during the life of the trial, how to handle adverse events, how to train patients to maintain accurate diaries of their experiences in the trial, and how to complete the all-important case report form, which is the extensive tool used by the trial sponsor to gather data from each site. There’s the opportunity for break-out teleconference rooms for small groups.

Another valuable VCS service for each clinical trial is a “study portal,” which Jackson explained is a secure online location where investigators can access the webcast as well as documentation on the trial. Should there be a change to the protocol, this virtual workspace is a way to spread the word and update educational information.

Jackson estimated that VCS has facilitated “hundreds” of webcasts since the company was established in late 2008. Some weeks, VCS may just facilitate two meetings, while other weeks there will be six. “We had three in one day the other day,” he said. Some sessions are just an hour long, while others are eight hours spread across two afternoons.

“Every time we provide a service, it has to be the Ritz-Carlton of service,” Jackson said. “Our clients don’t accept anything less.”

www.virtualclinical.com