Investing in a CTMS is a big decision as it is the first step towards scaling up your operations in the clinical trial industry. Whether you’re kicking off your first trial or just migrating from excel to a more sophisticated system, you need to spend some time researching to find that ideal CTMS vendor for your business.
But how do you determine which is the right CTMS vendor for your business? Here are some key attributes to look for when picking your CTMS vendor apart from focusing on the product capabilities.
1. An alignment of interest and focus with the CTMS vendor
To begin with, you may want to do a quick Google search for “CTMS vendor,” and you may come up with a list of a potential list of CTMS vendors. Scrutinize through the website of each of them to understand if their offering aligns with your requirement. Read through the ‘About Us’ section to get a sense of the company values and culture and how they take on the business. The case studies and client testimonials are other sections that give a hint of social proof and help you understand if you will benefit from partnering with the vendor.
Another section that sponsors and CROs miss checking out often is the blogs and educational resources section. This will help you to determine if the vendor has in-depth knowledge about the clinical trial industry.
2. Check for service and support
Once you switch to CTMS, you need to ensure that it is up and running at all times in your clinical trial studies. Downtime can cost you time and money and can create a road blockage in completing the trial within the timeline. Understand how good is the vendor with their service and support.
Check for their turnaround time should there be a problem, how many support personnel they deploy, and what others are saying about their service and support.
3. Ask for future releases in the CTMS domain
Know that the clinical trial industry is continually evolving in terms of CTMS and are becoming more efficient every day. Ask your shortlisted CTMS vendor what their future release plans are and if you will be able to upgrade to the new version. Knowing all these details can help you gauge how adaptive the CTMSvendor is about the clinical trial industry landscape.
Additionally, it is also essential to understand how frequently the CTMS vendor releases an update. In the past few years, there has been remarkable progress in technology and CTMS vendor evolution. You certainly want to stay at par with the industry standard. Choose the best CTMS vendor that releases at least three to four updates every year.
4. Check out for clinical trial customer retention rate
Most CTMS vendors you will come across will talk about how many customers they have. But you need to understand how much value do they offer in the clinical trial journey.
A good parameter to find out this is asking for customer retention rate. You should take it as a red flag if you find that not too many customers renewed their subscriptions.
5. Check implementation time of the CTMS
Different CTMS has different implementation time. Know that the more robust system you choose, the greater is the implementation and training time needed.
While you should find a CTMS that must have some features you need, you cannot compromise on the implementation timeline. So, you must understand the implementation time upfront.
6. Conduct Comparative Analysis
Once you have shortlisted the CTMS vendors, compare the costs of each with all the features and functionalities offered. Do not concentrate just on functional capabilities, but consider the other factors too, like support, the infrastructure needed, if you will make modifications later, and so on.
Finally, compare the costs and understand if it is within your budget.
Wrapping Up
Choosing the right CTMS vendor is an important task, and you need to spend a considerable amount of time researching the right one. A reliable CTMS vendor can help you scale up your clinical trial efforts while making it a smooth transition. It also enables effective communication through integrated CTMS features and substantially improves the clinical testing efficacy.
