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project planning system. In addition, all of the office-based work can be automatically tracked, even with current technology. With virtually everyone using a computer, a memory resident program can monitor time spent on individual tasks, for which the user must identify the task worked on. Future technology would be intelligent enough to identify the task itself. This still leaves some tasks, such as site visits, to be reported manually. However, even this could eventually be automated to a large extent because monitoring reports today are commonly completed on-site on a portable computer for later upload to the central office, and this could track the time spent on-site. |
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The great benefit of these possibilities is that it will relieve the project manager of much of the work of collecting the information and checking its validity. Yes, such semi-intelligent systems will make a few guesses about what is actually happening at any one time, but it is very much the author's experience that approximate progress data is far better than none at all (or perhaps worse, data which are later found to be invalid). The team members will also be delighted because they will not have to fill in any more time sheets! |
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Would such a system find ready acceptance among clinical research specialists? It is possible that they might regard it as a policing system, but if trials are being seriously carried out as professionally managed projects, such data will already be collected conventionally. Only the manner of collection will have changed. If people really are worried about task time data being picked up automatically, were they reporting it accurately before? |
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What can be done with the current state of the art? Some form of computerized clinical trial management system is now commonplace, although the data are usually entered manually. What generally happens is that reports are generated by such a system at intervals, and these are used to reenter progress information into the project planning system. Although there does not appear to be a fully integrated trial management and project planning system available off the shelf, computer linkage is possible, which eliminates transcription errors and keeps the project plan more up to date. |
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4.
Building Tighter Teams |
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The second area of crystal ball gazing is closely related to the first, as the IT revolution makes so many things possible. At the very beginning of the chapter, we looked at the disparate interests of the people involved in a typical study and the way they are conventionally managed. It is our view that there will be a move toward bringing clinical investigators much closer to the inner project team. At present they are hardly regarded as team |
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