First There Was Telehealth, Now There’s TeleCOA
Telehealth facilitates access to healthcare by allowing remote interactions between healthcare providers and patients. In clinical trials, clinical outcome assessments (COAs) are a critical part of the data collection, providing evidence for regulatory approval of treatments. TeleCOA is a specific form of telehealth that leverages digital technology for COA reporting to capture data remotely and provide improved flexibility and efficiency for sponsors, sites, and patients. TeleCOA enables fully remote live interaction between patients and clinicians, allowing a clinician to simultaneously perform the assessment while also evaluating and guiding the patient.
Recent accelerated use of telehealth
Telehealth is the use of technologies such as the web, phone, or video to facilitate healthcare visits and consultations. While telehealth has existed in various forms since the 1960s, the COVID-19 pandemic greatly increased its use and accelerated its offerings.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2019 only 43% of health centers could provide telehealth, compared with 95% of health centers that later reported using telehealth services during the COVID-19 pandemic. This steep increase demonstrates the rise in the use of telehealth by healthcare facilities and private practices across the nation and supports the continued importance of its use in healthcare today.
Tele technology reduces patient and site staff burden
Tele technologies like TeleCOA can ease patient burden by enabling the option for the participant to do remote visits from the comfort of the patient’s home, which can reduce burdens such as travel time and time off work.
TeleCOA also provides numerous benefits for clinical trial staff by:
By facilitating the organization of more flexible clinical trials, TeleCOA technologies can enable more widespread and inclusive patient recruitment. The resulting increase in patient diversity further provides a larger patient population for trials, and therefore, better clinical data and more comprehensive evidence to support the regulatory approval. Most importantly, patients can benefit from life-saving medical treatments to which they might not otherwise have had access.
Why Medable
Medable’s TeleCOA was developed through a collaborative effort with patients, sites, and the Medable Patient Advisory Council (PAC).
Integrable with Televisit and TeleConsent, Medable’s TeleCOA offers flexible, modular, and compliant clinical trial technologies and is part of Medable’s Decentralized Clinical Trial (DCT) platform—offering the highest level of global experience.
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