Peter Malamis from CRO Analytics told Outsourcing-pharma.com that instead of using metrics that vary trial to trial or feedback from a small number of respondents, his group aims to measure CRO performance with a set of tools designed to garner the opinions of multiple pharma sponsors.
“We’ll be collecting thousands of sponsor impressions as opposed to just a few hundred and it will be through a validated data collection instrument as opposed to a simple survey,” he explained, adding that “the output will be performance assessments based on the feedback from sponsor managers of outsourced clinical trials.”
Malamis, who is working on the project with Dr Michael Howley from Drexel University, suggested that the validated approach and the information generated could benefit both pharmaceutical sponsors and contract research organisations (CROs).
“It will be useful within both the RFP and selection process by sponsors but also in the management of long-term CRO partnerships and by the CRO’s themselves in their positioning and quality improvement efforts.”
“We’re currently in the validation stage and are working with sponsors, CRO’s, and individual managers of outsourced clinical research to validate the instruments. We expect that to be completed in the next two months."
Malamis also urged any Outsourcing-pharma.com readers who are interested in participating in the project to contact him directly at pmalamis@croanalytics.com.