I'm often asked how I ended up at a technology company as a nurse. Below is why...
Most patients don't have the option of participating in a clinical trial. That means, most people don't have access to a potential breakthrough or life saving treatment when they need it, even if one is available. Changing that fact is what I've dedicated my career to as a nurse.
I had the experience of working in a top Neuro ICU as a staff nurse and then a clinical research nurse when a procedure called a thrombectomy, which can now save millions of lives a year (link below), was first approved. A year before I was enrolling patients into these trials, I was literally body bagging patients with the same diagnosis on a somewhat consistent basis. It was as terrible as you can imagine it to be. While my trial patients were being saved, the majority of patients also experiencing similar strokes at the same time were dying because of their lack of access. Few of my trial patients came from rural areas or were minorities. Seeing how my trial patients starting living, many with almost normal lives again, because of these thrombectomy procedures changed me forever.
The resources we needed to pull off those early thrombectomy trials were enormous. On my own, I spent hundreds of additional hours beyond the clinical care team managing a single trial participant. This obviously does not scale across the healthcare system.
But, it doesn't have to be this way. We can simplify trials of the future. Technology is critical to enable standards, efficiencies, seamless information sharing, automation of processes and to allow physicians, nurses and clinical care teams to embed clinical trials into their standard practice.
Expanding patient access is not possible with the complicated mess of clinical trial operations we have going on today. We have to de-complicate trials in order to do this.
The mission of Veeva to make trials more efficient, and therefore accessible to more patients, could not be more personal for me. Committing to this mission is a big reason why I wake up every morning.
#CRAACO #patientsdeservemore #committed
(thrombectomy story: https://lnkd.in/eggAwvAa)
Why aren’t clinical trials more embedded into routine care? Listen to Bree Burks, VP of strategy for site solutions at Veeva, explain the obstacles facing patients who want to take part in studies.
Watch the full episode https://lnkd.in/gSkUSB3V and subscribe to State of Digital Clinical Trials - a Veeva podcast
