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Face It: Face-to-Face Meetings May Be a Thing of the Past

RxTrials welcomes Donna J. Percy, RN, BSN, as guest blogger who wrote the below post. Donna is vice president of Research at Sterling Research Group in Cincinnati, Ohio.

If fewer and fewer of your Investigator and Site Initiation Meetings are happening face-to-face, welcome to the new world order, where it appears that technology may trump tradition.

Face-to-face meetings are a long-standing tradition in this industry - one that many do not want to give up. Most people enjoy these meetings because they often are seen as a "perk," with travel to a nice location, good food, open bar, etc. What's not to like about that? The drawback, from a site's perspective, is that such meetings are a non-reimbursed expense. We have to pay, at our own expense, to send a coordinator and investigator to a meeting across the country. Very commonly, staff spend more time traveling than actually meeting. Adding to this is the fact that staff are out of the office for at least two days, typically - days when they would normally be seeing study patients. So you're faced with having to trade off an uncompensated expense for a sure source of revenue.

What's always been a sticking point for me on this issue is that sponsors DO pay for their own staff to attend - they don't expect their professionals to personally foot the bill for this purpose. Yet that's the expectation for their site partners. In my opinion, if sponsors recognized this as the real expense it is for sites, this would be less of an issue.

The ideal alternative for us is the Site Initiation Visit. These are actually the best way for us to go....all staff can be there, we can talk to a "live person," and we have all our documents and supplies right there in front of us. My position on this issue now is different than it once was. Today, my perspective is driven, by necessity, by "dollars and sense." I'm in favor of technology-supported, web-based meetings because the cost and time savings benefits are HUGE. With web-based meetings, ALL staff can participate in the part that is pertinent to them - i.e., lab personnel, recruiters, data entry personnel - so EVERYONE at the site gets trained, versus just one coordinator and one PI. This can generally be accomplished in four hours. Whoever goes to a face-to-face meeting easily spends that much time on an airplane, doing (probably) non work-related reading or sleeping! I would wager that most people (including me) like face-to-face meetings best for the socializing/networking aspect. But depending on who attends, most people don't truly take advantage of those opportunities.

Regardless of the type of meeting, though, the things that make it worthwhile are how well it is planned and executed. I can't tell you how many times we send someone to a meeting and they come back with questions still unanswered. So what was the point?

Despite some drawbacks, today's technology makes web meetings a lot more sensible, particularly monetarily, than face-to-face meetings. Ironically, as I put the finishing touches on this blog, I am at an Investigator's Meeting in Arizona. In fact, currently most of our upcoming studies are still going with the face-to-face meetings.Now you know where I stand...but what's your point of view? Would you prefer to stick with tradition or cozy up to the technology?

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