Medical Research Network
Integrated Solutions That Deliver Patient-Centric Clinical Trials Around The World

In the wake of the pandemic, the medical research community moved quickly to adopt and leverage innovations and ingenuity, operating effectively. They embraced decentralized clinical trials (DCT) as a modality for disease treatments and drug development, overcoming adversity. According to recent surveys, around 83 percent of sites and 80 percent of sponsors actively invested in DCT as a strategic priority. With its core focus on patient-centricity, the model is expected to persist, addressing needs like patient diversification, recruitment, and retention—significant challenges in traditional trial methods.

While the pandemic was a decisive moment for DCT, decentralization efforts in clinical research had been in progress for several years, driven by the need to make trials easier for patients to participate in and to increase diversity and inclusion among trial patients. Needless to say, participant homogeneity continues to be an enduring bottleneck in the medical research space, affecting the applicability of study results and the equity of research overall. Approving therapies with safety and efficacy profiles that don't align with the needs of patient groups creates a potentially dangerous issue and results in inefficiencies.

Further challenges include patient outreach, recruitment, and retention, along with ensuring trial efficiency. These lead to long trials and reduced revenue potential or high development costs for sponsors.

“How can this be fixed? Emphasizing the use of patient-centric trial models in conjunction with advanced mobile technology and fostering collaboration among research sites and stakeholders represents the optimal approach,” states Stuart Redding, CEO of Medical Research Network (MRN).

MRN, an innovative and market leader of patient and site-centric solutions for clinical trial delivery, originated from a large commercial in-home healthcare provider, providing it with a natural advantage in comprehending the increasingly complex and unique nature of clinical trials. This wealth of knowledge, combined with extensive industry experience of its teams, catalyzed the development of MRN's patient-centric and site-centric tools and models that expand patient access, enhance recruitment and retention, and improve trial efficiency, all while reducing overall trial timelines and costs.
Since its establishment in 2006, MRN has steadfastly focused on driving the medical research community in achieving these pivotal objectives. The company possesses the expertise to design an optimal blend of clinical and digital tools, resulting in superior clinical trial outcomes. MRN’s unwavering commitment to patient and family experience in clinical trials has given rise to one of the most efficient site and patient-centric solutions, solidifying its position as an innovative, market leader in a constantly shifting marketplace.

“Increased patient centricity is transforming the clinical research space, and we, at MRN, always uphold a true patient-centric ethos as the core of our business operations,” says Redding.

MRN’s core competency lies in creating the optimal site and patient strategy to deliver clinical trials. Staying true to this mission, MRN leverages its specialized expertise, industry experience, and a creative approach to deliver novel solutions to drug developers, health organizations, and investigators, helping accelerate the drug development process, getting drugs to the market faster.

The firm’s key offerings are Integrated Trial Services, Home Trial Support (HTS), and Site & Professional Support (S&PS), all of which are designed to provide expert clinical inputs and optimize protocol design to deliver the best patient and site trial experiences all while supporting their pharma clients’ clinical and commercial needs.

The Future is Integrated Clinical Trials

The MRN team is well into its journey to provide sponsors with optimized trial delivery. This transformative journey is primarily fueled by MRN's steadfast site and patient-centric ethos, technological innovation, and agile culture, promising significant improvements in the way the company serves its clients. MRN's customized solution design works as a single provider to empower patient and site participation in clinical research. This seamless delivery can speed up clinical trials by creating strategies with their clients that increase recruitment and retention of patients, dramatically reducing trial timelines and speeding up the IMP reaching its next development milestone. This approach works to maximize revenue potential or reduce development costs by taking IMP out of development faster while keeping individual trial costs the same or lower than traditional designs.

“As a company led by an innovative group of people, we always strive to move in the right direction that our clients need us to, supporting their trials end-to-end,” says Redding.

Removing participation barriers for more efficient trials

MRN’s HTS solution brings clinical trials to those unable or unwilling to participate in the traditional trial model at a hospital site or clinic. This innovated way to deliver care, once only sought out by early adopters, has evolved into a standard tool more readily utilized to reduce participation burden on patients, expand the reach of sites into more communities, and create access to trials for more patient populations. Supported by a global team of healthcare professionals, clinical research experts, and digital tools, MRN takes clinical trials to the patient by conducting simple or complex research visits in the community while maintaining data quality for sites and drug developers. Conducting clinical trial visits at a convenient place such as homes, schools, or places of work increases flexibility for the patient, as does conducting a visit at a time more convenient to the patient. In fact, in just the last 12 months, more than 12 percent of MRN’s visits delivered have been outside of standard office hours. This indicates that patients like having convenient clinical trials.

HTS addresses several patient challenges linked to traditional trial visits, including travel logistics, cost, and extended site visits, as well as potential mobility, cognitive, or other disease-related challenges. This model can work for various patient types; MRN has delivered trials for over 100 different indications, but it has been especially impactful for conditions such as rare diseases, pediatrics, and complex indications like Alzheimer's.

Bringing the trial to the patient creates access to trials and can support a diverse patient population. This is ideal for sponsors and sites, allowing them to increase the geographic reach for patient recruitment. More importantly, it allows sites to have a higher throughput of patients, helping them achieve higher recruitment and enrollment. An analysis of 318 patients, whom MRN supported in their clinical trial journey, revealed that the median distance covered was 64 miles from the trial sites. This distance is more than three times the distance patients self-reported they were willing to travel for routine health care.

“Through our HTS solution, a greater number of patients from various communities can participate in a clinical trial by bringing the trial to them,” says Redding.

With its international reach and highly clinical capabilities, MRN’s HTS offering has emerged as the ideal solution for clients and a key revenue-driver for the firm. The right innovation, process, system, and personnel in place have helped it manage a high growth rate, which was further accelerated by the pandemic and the subsequent need to move trials into a decentralized model.

Upholding the Success by Empowering Sites

A site is a key element that drives successful patient support and clinical trial delivery, and MRN’s site and patient services are designed to offer professional support and solutions for clinical trial sites. It is made up of experienced, trained healthcare professionals, and site coordinators who are deployed to work with investigators on-site, easing their burdens and helping to keep their sites to timescales and within budgets.

Onsite resourcing support serves as the most important arm of any site running clinical trials. This is ideal for sites that have lost significant numbers of staff since the pandemic, leaving them under-resourced to deliver patient healthcare needs before clinical research participation can even be considered. MRN is committed to providing research nurses, healthcare professionals, and other trained professionals to these overworked and under-resourced sites on an ad-hoc, permanent, or short-term contract basis. This helps them make sure the clinical trial gets delivered with the resources they need.

The trial-naive site setup is another aspect of MRN’s site and patient services, where it delivers the necessary support and services to physicians without required experience for initiating trials by meeting all industry prerequisites. This includes training and support that allows new sites to be research-ready, along with the resources and technology they need to support clinical trials as they begin to participate. Through this, the firm aims to assist the industry in opening up new trial sites capable of recruiting patients into clinical trials. MRN's expertise includes a site network that actively consolidates a network of sites capable of recruiting patients for its clients. Pharma customers and CROs can establish and manage these sites as a coordinated group through MRN, thereby enhancing their clinical trial patient recruitment efforts by onboarding sites they can be confident have the support they need.

Technology Optimized In-Home Clinical Visits

MRN’s solutions are enhanced by its technology platform and tools, integrating advanced capabilities with in-home clinical visits conducted by trained healthcare professionals with at-site data collection activity. The synergy between in-home and at-site clinical and digital delivery improves the outcomes of decentralized clinical trials, increasing flexibility and efficiency, while enhancing data quality. Its eSource serves as an advanced data collection tool, allowing healthcare professionals to directly capture source data during in-home clinical visits. The collected data is then validated and seamlessly delivered into clients’ EDC systems, ensuring accessibility at sites and for sponsors. Additionally, the company has implemented its ECR tool to further guarantee data integrity by minimizing data entry errors.

“All of these services are carefully consolidated into our integrated trial services, a new line of business that elevates MRN to be the most innovative and customized patient and site-centric organization,” says Redding.

As the medical research community completely recovers from the effects of the global pandemic and enters the new era of trials, MRN’s integrated trial services serve as the game-changer, allowing for enhancing patient reach, recruitment and retention, patient diversification, and speeding up drug development through more efficient trials. This serves as inspiration for the industry to bring in new innovations to the market, elevating patient care and wellness to greater heights.