The average cost of a phase 1 clinical trial is $4 million. At this early stage of drug development, patient recruitment delays can quickly drain a clinical trial budget. To keep timelines on track, many sponsors are rethinking how they reach participants.
A mobile clinic is a specialized vehicle that travels directly to trial participants to provide healthcare services. With mobile clinics, providers can reach the country’s most vulnerable populations. One study suggests more than half of mobile clients are women (55%) and racial or ethnic minorities (59%).
There are vast benefits to leveraging mobile clinics for your clinical research. By reaching participants where they live, work, or congregate, you create a more patient-first experience. This model helps you enroll more diverse patient groups while reducing the execution barriers that drive up early-phase costs.
Similar to other mobile healthcare units, 2020 On-site’s mobile vision clinic provides mobile eye care services to patients across the country. If you have a clinical trial that requires eye exams, a mobile vision clinic can be a great option to reduce barriers to care and improve the patient experience because our vehicles can go directly on-site.
Our mobile vision clinic, making a pitstop at Quail Creek, Utah.
Request a special invitation to take a virtual tour of our mobile vision clinic here.
Just like any other clinical trial cost, the cost of using a mobile vision clinic depends on a variety of factors. Things such as study size, locations, number of clinical sites, and specific tests or procedures needed per protocol can impact the cost of using a mobile vision clinic. The cost of a single patient assessment can be anywhere from $150 to $1500 depending on the complexity of the assessment and the staff required to perform it.
Additional benefits of working with 2020 On-site's mobile vision clinic:
Overall, getting a mobile vision clinic to your research site is a straightforward process — like any other vendor — once you start the conversation with our team.
The average cost of phase 1 clinical trials is $4 million. With that investment already on the line, you may ask yourself, “Is having a mobile vision clinic for my clinical trial worth it?”
While software platforms handle data management, a mobile clinic provides the physical point-of-need execution required for a hybrid clinical study. By removing travel barriers, this model directly improves patient enrollment and retention, protecting your budget from the high-cost delays listed below:
Point-of-need execution helps you reach diverse patient populations and enroll highly qualified trial participants. By partnering with 20/20 Onsite, CROs and sponsors significantly reduce the operational effort required to screen participants before they arrive at the research site.
Because we provide mobile eye exams on wheels, we can travel anywhere in the continental United States. This provides accessible, high-quality testing to trial participants who may not otherwise join an early phase study. In fact, our team traveled over 200,000 miles throughout 48 states. We saw hundreds of patients of all ages on behalf of pharmaceutical companies, sponsors, and CROs. What used to be a burdensome process for patients is now more convenient, with patients traveling an average of only 12.36 miles for their appointment with us — a drastic improvement from most clinical trials, where the average distance traveled is 41.2 miles.
Another benefit for sponsors and CROs includes pre-screening participants to ensure they fit your specific clinical trial protocol. Rather than acting as a replacement for a clinical trial site, we provide the necessary inclusion and exclusion criteria. We verify this through specialized imaging and clinical procedures before advancing a patient forward to capture trial data. That means you have the peace of mind knowing the patients enrolled in your trial are qualified by our team before they get to your site.
One study estimated that clinics and health systems lose over $150,000 per provider, per year as a result of no-shows — a risk you don’t want impacting your clinical study. The average patient no-show rate is almost 19% (optometry specifically is estimated at 25%). When calculated against daily appointments, this severely impacts the overall cost and timelines of your drug development program.
However, our team has an extremely successful appointment rate with only about 10% no-shows or late cancellations. This can be attributed to our mobile vision clinics reducing travel times for patients and increasing convenience by bringing the appointments directly to them.
When you partner with us for your clinical trial, patients no longer have to depend on loved ones to take time out of their day to take them to a visit, especially if they are suffering from a condition that impacts their eyesight. They are also more likely to attend critical follow-up exams because they don’t need to take time off of work or take time from their busy schedules to travel to city centers or research sites — the study comes to them.
Onboard, the patient experience is even more enjoyable. Our doctors and staff can spend more time with each patient to learn about their background, lifestyle, and condition. We are also able to offer breaks to rest or to recharge between exams. It’s no wonder 2020 On-site has maintained a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of at least 95% over the years for both our routine optometry side of the business and our clinical program services — when patients come aboard, they love the experience with our doctors and staff, and appreciate the fact that we go the extra mile to deliver high-quality care when they need it.
Our team has also suggested small improvements to clinical protocols based on patient feedback that were then adopted more widely across sites. For example, we switched the order in which testing is conducted so the most intense exam was done first. We also implemented a patient suggestion to install neon tape to the aisle so other patients with low vision can move around easier and safer on board the clinic. While they may seem small, these changes drastically improved the patient experience, reducing the risk of fatigue or drop-outs.
"Thank you all for everything you do to make things easier for our patients! They loved the experience."
During the study activation process, you dedicate a substantial allocation of time and budget to train site personnel. By working with the 20/20 Onsite team, we act as an extension of your project management team. This helps offset screen failures, protects your clinical trial budget, and reduces early drop-outs.
When we conduct pre-screen imaging and testing, we examine all inclusion criteria put forth by your protocols — age, gender, medical history, and so on. With this stopgap, the risk of moving any ineligible patients (the most common cause of screen failures) forward in your study is reduced. Additionally, because patients are pre-screened with our team, your study has a higher-quality patient pool, which also reduces the costs to the sites of screen failures.
By the time patients reach your research site, they have already been exposed to some level of testing with our team. Therefore, if the exam involves any particular focus or is lengthly, the patient has some expectations of the intensity before starting since they experienced it onboard our mobile vision clinic first. This relieves some burden placed on your team since patients are primed, more relaxed, and more comfortable in the exam environment. This pre-exposure to testing also reduces the risk of drop-outs or refusal to participate because participants are already aware of the study details, its duration, and potential risks.
If your upcoming clinical trial requires precise ocular data capture, 20/20 Onsite's clinical program services can help. We protect your trial's sample size and streamline your path to FDA approval. Get in touch with us today to discuss pricing and timelines for your next study.