RxTrials Communiqué - A Blog About Clinical Research

Can you speak on the difficulty of tracking (in real-time) time and effort of Billable and NON-billable task/activities of clinical research coordinators?  
 
I have researched many institutions and it seems that most institutions continue to track time and effort(for CRC's)manually using paper, or have the CRC's manually input their time and effort electronically. I have yet to come across an institution which tracks their activities in 'real-time'.  
 
This is an important issue because in a Clinical Research Trial, cost and efficiency is extremely important, behind patient safety of course. How can we better track their activities, so that our CRC’s can become more efficient in completing their assigned tack and duties? Currently we estimate time and effort, based on previous trials; however, we would like to get better at doing this. We believe that if we can track their task throughout the day in ‘real-time’ we can better forecast cost and become a more efficient institution… including activities that are considered “non-billable” or may not have a billable code attached to it, such as walking a patient to an office, or time spent speaking to a client about an issue, or writing a report.