Remote Consent Clinical Research

Remote Consent Clinical Research. Recruitment in clinical research trials can be challenging in trials that are time-sensitive and/or are rare disease and critical care trials. One of the hurdles for recruitment in these types of clinical trials is due to the consent process, and the need to have consent of the patient within a certain timeframe, or the patient unable to consent for themselves.

This paper will discuss the usage of the utilization of remote consent options for these trials. According to Welch et al, lack of recruitment of qualified subjects is a continuing bottleneck in clinical research which in turn can have impacts on the duration of the trial.

The authors discussed that the current widely used approach of getting consent from patients involves having in-person meetings between the potential research subject and a qualified research personnel. Yet, the authors discuss that the challenge in this arises if a potential subject is recruited remotely, or one or more groups are required.

The following sections will describe the challenges of recruitment in rare diseases, specifically critical care trials, and the benefits of utilizing remote consent options. The authors mention that trials in rare diseases face many hurdles, including the need to meet recruitment goals.

From personal experience, sites that have a remote consenting option should follow a process analogous to how the
consent process would take place if the participant were on-site and technological options available such as phone/video conferencing to explain the study.

Clin Trial Pract Open J. 2019; 2(1): 22-24. doi: 10.17140/CTPOJ-2-109