We are pleased to announce the details of our next Virtual Global Workshop on 12-16 October 2020 (which replaces our planned Global Workshop in Dublin which is postponed until 2021). The virtual workshop will include a mix of global and regional events and is open to participants from any member company in any region.

Our last virtual workshop was a great success and this one will be even better. We have made sure that sessions are as convenient as possible for the different timezones across the world by limiting the duration of global sessions and offering more regional sessions. Learning from each other is what we do best and we will be introducing a number of ways to increase interactivity during the workshop (although nothing can replace the networking and comeraderie of an eCF face-to-face meeting!). REGISTER HERE

According to the FDA’s website, “Real-world data (RWD) and real-world evidence (RWE) are playing an increasing role in health care decisions.”  And a recent survey by the eClinical Forum showed that most respondents believe that RWD and RWE will become much more important in clinical research over the next few years.  As a result, many questions have arisen regarding the use cases, data sources, quality of these sources, regulatory guidance documents and so on. The goal of this “Birds of a Feather” session is to present some basic information on these topics and to present a few case examples to illustrate how RWD and RWE are playing an increasingly important role in research. 

Presenter/Facilitator:  Ken Light, Clinscape

In 1996, HIPAA legislation called for the development of a national patient identifier system that would give each person in the United States a permanently assigned, unique number to be used across the entire spectrum of the national healthcare system.   That project was never funded by congress, but just last year (June, 2019) Congress voted to appropriate $99 billion dollars to an HHS bill that included creation of a National Patient Identifier.

Ken will review this topic, and oversee a group dialog around the benefits, challenges, and impact related to healthcare and clinical trials.   

There has been a dramatic increase in clinical data types, sources and systems in recent years enabling new insights into patient experiences while also presenting challenges in consolidating, standardizing and analyzing these new data streams.  The tools for centralizing, integrating, mapping and analyzing data have not kept pace with research and are causing cycle time delays and require numerous manual processes.  This technology showcase will describe how new platforms like the elluminate Clinical Data Platform are automating the ingestion of data from numerous eClinical systems and sources, enabling faster data mapping and standardization, supporting risk based data review and advancing both clinical and operational analytics.  

Presented by Sheila Rocchio and Sam Parnell of eClinical Solutions.

The Virtual Workshop on May 11-13 that replaced the planned face-to-face Spring Workshops in Helsinki, Finland and Princeton, NJ was a huge success.  It was attended by over 130 members from around the globe, representing 46 member companies -- many of whom would not have been able to attend a face-to-face meeting and this was their first eCF workshop. 4 EMA inspectors and several guests also attended. Evaluations gave the workshop a 4.3/5.0 which is lower than our face-to-face workshops, but for our first virtual workshop we are happy with this grade!  A few comments from the evaluations: "Always an excellent group with many real experts.  The interactions are very good."  "Congratulations on an excellent event.  Everything worked well.  Sure, we missed the networking and evening events, but this worked well."  "eClinical Forum is a fantastic source of information about the landscape of eClinical today."  "eCF continues to be incredible value for money"

We are planning for another Virtual Workshop in Autumn 2020 (the week of October 12-16) and hoping to return to face-to-face workshops for Spring 2021. We now have a lot of good ideas for improvements for our 2nd Virtual Workshop! If anyone wants to make suggestions, please send to info@eclinicalforum.org. Thanks!!