Fortrea, Advarra and Veeva form partnership to 'dramatically simplify' clinical trial process

The partnership aims to deliver an integrated patient- and site-centric solution provoding a smooth and effective clinical trial experience.

Fortrea says that because the industry is constantly faced with complex challenges, it wanted to establish an alliance of industry partners, starting with the founding members – Veeva and Advarra, to tackle these challenges head-on.  

The alliance agrees that many sites are burdened by administrative operations that have multiple, complex technologies with limited interoperability. This, they say, impacts their ability to focus on what matters most—the patients—and being able to improve their recruitment and experience participating in clinical studies.

Pain points of sites and patients

“We heard from our site advisory board that the multitude of technologies used on a study is one of their greatest challenges,” said Fortrea chief operating officer and president of clinical services, Mark Morais.

“Working with industry-leading partners and founding members, Veeva and Advarra, we’re taking action to remove complexities so we can address the pain points of sites and patients and make a difference. We are leveraging our unique vantage point in the industry that enables us to layer our expertise over the tech and data ecosystems from best-in-class partners—adding to our alliance as we go—to dramatically simplify the experience for patients, sites, and sponsors.”

For sites, the partnership says it is set to deliver a cloud-based, simplified sign-on experience for Fortrea-run studies, access to study technologies through a single dashboard, and a unified environment with a single repository for study documents and records.

Patients' trial journey

For patients, the solution is being designed to offer easy-to-access, step-by-step, visit-by-visit support and education throughout a patient’s trial journey, a simplified user experience through a single platform, and self-referral functionality to search and find studies on their disease area of interest, ongoing patient support and education via an online portal or mobile app, and a simplified mobile and web application for consenting and responding to outcome surveys.

“Veeva is helping to advance clinical trials with connected applications that reduce the burden of participating for patients, streamline execution for research sites, and increase transparency for sponsors,” said Jim Reilly, vice president, of Veeva's development cloud strategy.

“Extending our partnership with Fortrea to deliver Veeva Clinical Platform applications will meet the unique needs of patients, sites, and sponsors while significantly improving study data quality and collaboration with sites.”

Unified technology

Fortrea, Veeva and Advarra are keen to offer a seamless, unified technology solution that integrates best-in-class technologies and leverages Fortrea’s process expertise. This, they say will help ease the administrative burden for patients and sites and increase the accessibility of clinical trials for the public.

“Advarra’s mission is to break the silos that impede clinical research, so we are excited to provide our Longboat solution and IRB services as part of this innovative and collaborative partnership aimed at reducing site and patient burden,” said Elisa Cascade, chief product officer at Advarra.

“By leveraging our Longboat solution, Fortrea will deliver a reimagined clinical research experience that will improve both protocol compliance and site and patient engagement throughout the clinical trial process.”