Ryan Adams is a clinical research coordinator at Dr. Jeffrey Crespin’s gastroenterology practice in Manhattan. Ryan uses StudyTeam to manage the site’s patient recruitment efforts. We spoke with him to understand his role and how he uses StudyTeam to manage patient recruitment and enrollment across multiple sites.
What’s your favorite part of your job?
I'm a people person, so I really thrive with in-person interaction. I like seeing patients face-to-face. You get a better level of respect and understanding.
Does StudyTeam help you manage patient interactions?
StudyTeam helps me keep track of things. If I have someone in the clinic, I can just pull up their information in StudyTeam and enter things directly rather than relying on handwritten notes. In StudyTeam I can even enter information for myself to remind me of something specific for a patient. Since we're centered in Manhattan, we have a lot of competition with major hospitals and other institutions, so working from StudyTeam with patients has been productive.
Do patients benefit from you being able to see that information in one place?
It helps on a long-term basis because there are some exclusion criteria where you could still revisit the patient after some period of time. So I could initially pre-screen the patient but then go back into my pre-screen fail list and start finding people who might not have been eligible a month ago for some reason, but now they are. Instead of flipping through 50 pages of EMR records, I can just go right back into the StudyTeam.
How long have you been using StudyTeam?
I started using StudyTeam when I started this role about a year ago. It's a platform I wish I had in my prior job. I used to work at a major hospital where our patient referrals were more emergent because I worked in neurosurgery, so it was brain trauma, tumors, strokes, aneurysms, things like that. We were able to operate pretty efficiently, but having StudyTeam in that prior job would have made a huge difference.
What are your overall perceptions of StudyTeam?
It's a very seamless, easy-to-use platform, especially with the support staff I've worked with at OneStudyTeam—I was able to just send them the protocol, and they built a whole portfolio based on what I asked and tailored it to my needs. It's very customizable, and everything's laid out very simply, so I rather enjoy it.
Does OneStudyTeam help you manage multiple trials?
Yeah, for example, we had a patient who was misdiagnosed with Crohn's. We were screening them for one study, and I screen failed them. But they actually had colitis, and when we had a relevant study start I was able to seamlessly transfer the patient's record from one study to the other.
Does StudyTeam help you manage referrals or recruitment?
I can see when people put in potential patients for me, and I can follow up with them directly or see when those people have contacted the patients themselves. I can also see how many times those patients have already been contacted, and I can verify their contact info. So there's a lot of nice two-way information flow that I've been getting out of this, and it's expanded our network for potential recruitment.
How does StudyTeam benefit your communication with sponsors?
It’s definitely helpful to be able to refer sponsors to StudyTeam instead of providing different people updates all the time. StudyTeam is the central repository where I have access to upload, edit, and provide any updates on patients based on emails, phone calls, any follow-ups, reasons for screen fails. Instead of spending time printing out run sheets and meeting in person, I can have sponsors refer to their view in StudyTeam. To a sponsor, it's great because they can see how many patients pre-screen failed and why before we even get to the screening process.
What would you want sponsors to know about the way StudyTeam helps your workflow?
Most importantly it maintains transparency so that they can see at the site level who's at what stage and what the details are. So when they call me, they already know the questions they want to ask. That transparency removes a lot of those basic questions—instead of starting at step one, we're already at step five. It makes a big difference.
Do you save time using StudyTeam compared to other methods of managing the enrollment process?
It saves a significant amount of time. It saves me from having to physically write things down, and it reduces the time I have to spend communicating the same information to multiple people. For example, instead of providing weekly updates with reporting logs, I can direct the sponsor to their view in StudyTeam to see any relevant tracking information, and it's tenfold faster.