To facilitate the exchange of information throughout the chain and the coordination of the trial’s different stages, we rely on digital tools, adapted to the specificities and challenges of the laboratory.
Interactive response technology (IRT)
IRT is a way to manage patient enrollment, patient randomization, and study drug supplies.
This is a specialized management tool found at the heart of all clinical trials. It helps to ensure the panel of patients is as representative as possible and manages the distribution of drugs throughout the study. It makes it possible, for example, to balance the populations receiving the drug tested against the comparators, and to avoid bias (voluntary or not) in the recruitment of patients and the groups they’re assigned to. It also manages drug stocks, and has advanced functions, like quarantining doubtful products while awaiting quality control (which can, for instance, prevent us from throwing away or re-ordering drugs unnecessarily).
IRT remains an extremely complex technology that laboratories do not always master and whose possibilities are often unexplored. Worse, inappropriate IRT settings can result in additional inefficiencies and waste in the study. One of the first optimizations, therefore, involves configuring the tool specifically for each study, so as to take into account the particularities of the protocol, the product, and any other operational constraints identified upstream.
