The world today is caught in a real predicament, living through an apocalyptic scenario, in a daze of disbelief – if not outright denial. This is no fictional account from a Robin Cook bestseller, there isn’t a heroic protagonist stepping up to contain Covid-19. Although we aren’t questioning our chances of survival yet, most aspects of our lives have been seriously altered.  As malls, gyms, offices, schools and colleges around us are being closed, work-from-home has become more or less of a slogan. Conferences are getting cancelled or postponed. Most well-laid travel plans and business meetings have come to naught.

What can we do next?

We can simply quarantine ourselves, but not because we are infected. Social distancing is a technique which helps to keep infections at bay, halting the exponential growth of secondary infections mid-stride. Social Distancing keeps the numbers of the ‘infected’ low and ensures that the 5-day incubation period does not make it possible for the ‘exposed’ people go around infecting others in their community, who in turn infect more! To see how this works, follow South Korea’s Patient 31, to whom 1160 people were exposed, and who in turn exposed 9300 others!

This is why everyone is stressing repeatedly on the importance of social distancing today. Doing it tomorrow may prove one day too late for some, while it may be a whole lifetime for others. Let’s not forget that we will never have enough of any of these: hospitals, medical professionals, caregivers, protective gear, ventilators and ICUs to get through a pandemic of this size. More cases will only cause this system to collapse faster. No one is expendable. We cannot choose to discriminate whom to support and whom not to. It becomes a matter of duty – for our personal wellbeing and for the well-being of our communities, to necessarily follow the diktats on social distancing and see that the cases do not grow in number.

Follow Taiwan:

Taiwan was aware that there would be a lot of travel between China and Taiwan around the Lunar New Year. Taiwan took a disaster management approach linking central, regional and local authorities using technology to quickly identify the cases, allot the necessary resources to them while ensuring that they are contained. The country’s national insurance database was integrated with its immigration and customs database to set up alerts on travel and clinical histories together, and tracked their flight origin to determine if they need to be quarantined right away. It offered toll-free numbers in each city for patients to report in, and offered support in every way possible while ensuring that the infection didn’t spread. During this time, it didn’t fail to educate the public and fight misinformation. It took control of its borders, both by air and sea.

What’s next? Mitigation.

Even as we contain the spread of the virus, we must remember that it will not completely vanish. We may slow it down with social distancing but we really need to find ways to mitigate it. In other words, we need to find vaccination against it and a cure for it. Here’s where the Clinical Trials Oversight System would prove useful to you, even when you are keeping a ‘social distance’ and working remotely.

• The CTOS delivers timely access standardized and aggregated clinical trial operations by study as well as patient data, to allow efficient trial oversight via remote monitoring, using assess controls, data quality management, clinical reviews, and statistical computing.
• Unlike a CTMS, the CTOS enables you to aggregate trial management data across the trials happening at different locations in a Clinical Operations Data Repository.
• A trial sponsor can be involved in the day-to-day operations of an outsourced clinical trials and have access to the data and reports from the project, in real time.
• The sponsor will know what’s working and what’s not, and can intervene and take action if required to improve the quality and timelines of the clinical operations portfolio being managed by various CROs simultaneously.

We all know that clinical trials face issues with time and cost overruns and can even fail to clear the hurdles set by regulatory requirements. As you fight these issues, do let us know if you would like to have complementary access to MaxisIT’s CTOS to work with clean data and an AI-powered tool which provides you with actionable insights in real-time.

About MaxisIT

At MaxisIT, we clearly understand strategic priorities within clinical R&D, as they resonate well with our own experience of implementing solutions for improving Clinical Development Portfolio via an integrated platform. An ideal platform delivers timely access to study-specific as well as standardized and aggregated clinical trial operations as well as patient data, and allows efficient trial oversight via remote monitoring, statistically assessed controls, data quality management, clinical reviews, and statistical computing. Moreover, it provides capabilities for planned vs. actual trending, optimization, as well as for fraud detection and risk-based monitoring.

MaxisIT’s Clinical Trials Oversight System (CTOS) enables “data-driven digital transformation” by its complete AI enabled analytics platform. From data ingestion, processing, analysis to in-time clinical intelligence by establishing value of data. The CTOS empowers clinical stakeholders to mitigate risks and seize the opportunity in the most efficient manner at a reduced cost.