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What are decentralised clinical trials?

Clinical trials are essential to prove the safety and efficacy of new medicines. They remain challenging to deliver due to low participation rates. Decentralised Clinical Trial (DCTs) approaches hold the potential to address some of these challenges.

Decentralised clinical trials are trials in which activities are designed to take place at, or in the vicinity of, the participant’s home, rather than at a traditional clinical site. This approach can make use of electronic health technologies and other innovative operational approaches to facilitate data collection.

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Types of decentralised approaches

In a fully decentralised clinical trial, participants never physically visit a site, although in most trials they still have contact with the investigational team remotely. However, many clinical trials merely involve DCT elements without being fully decentralised. There are many decentralised elements that can be introduced in a trial, some of them figured below: