Clinical trials require people in hospitals. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the United States, many clinical trials were stopped to keep hospitals safe for patients and to prevent the virus from spreading. This impacted investigator meetings, most of which were canceled. But research can’t stop forever, and the ability to hold productive virtual investigator meetings can help keep trials on track. The team at Summit Management Services has already figured out how.

Our clients are life sciences companies that don’t have in-house meeting planners or have been forced to let their internal planning team go (due to the pandemic). We are finding that people are still in shock – how will we conduct business remotely? Will our budgets roll over to next year? There are a lot of unknowns.

We have held numerous virtual investigator meetings since March 2020. It’s not just an automatic switch from live and in-person to online. There are a lot of things to consider. In a typical webinar, the presenter throws information out there and the attendees don’t have much control over what’s happening. It’s static interactivity between the presenter and the audience, and it just doesn’t work as a substitute for an investigator meeting.

Virtual Platforms absolutely enable our clients to hold investigator meetings online, especially due to the way content is delivered and how much information about participation is reported. The meetings we’ve held so far have gone swimmingly well. Our virtual platforms are so easy to use, and it has helped our clients run great meetings.

The virtual platforms we have employed have delivered five key results that our clients require to run successful investigator meetings:

Digital sign-in has met FDA standards to verify that clinicians attended the meeting.
Attendees have several ways to interact with the speaker and the slide deck. They can make notes on individual slides, send and receive messages from the presenters, and take polls to reinforce that they understand the material.
The technology is simple to use. No one has to download anything, they just log into a website.
The slides are separated from the speaker, but it’s all on one screen. It’s a very professional presentation,.
The reporting features are great for our industry. Our investigator meetings review the protocols and findings of trials. Knowledge checks are so important! The study team can see what percentage of the audience understood what was presented, which slides were saved and studied. Our clients pore over the reports, and it’s exactly what they need to move forward, especially in the virtual environment. If protocols aren’t followed, study results can be thrown out the window. And with novel drugs that are specialized, vetting and testing patients in smaller trials is already hard enough.

We are currently working with numerous clients to plan – among other types of events – more virtual investigator meetings.