“With a rapidly growing number of trials posting to Inato’s marketplace, it became critical that we double down on ‘flipping the model’ for sites by ensuring they can easily and quickly find and select the right clinical trials for their teams and patients,” said Inato CEO and Co-Founder Kourosh Davarpanah on the platform’s latest released updates.
Driven by the company-wide desire to bring sites more power in the clinical trial site selection process, these updates began with our product team hearing from sites on how Inato could enhance their user experience and grow their power and voice. Inato’s Senior Product Designer, Charles Guillocher, explained that the research and feedback process took around three months. They interviewed over thirty sites until they felt they had a good understanding of what was needed from Inato to enhance and better their trial application process.
The results from the conversations were consistent: “Sites are craving visibility,” said Guillocher. This response wasn’t a huge surprise, “Site selection has historically been a very opaque process with sites being left in the dark,” explained Davarpanah. This feedback solidified the new goal for these updates: increased transparency.
“At the end of the day, we want to put sites in the driver's seat. To us, that means providing clarity in a seamless and digestible way to help sites find the right trials and be able to prioritize their work.” - Alexa Hibbert, Director of Product Management
Now, with a more clear understanding of what they sought to achieve – enabling sites to discover more trials and take more action to win the right ones – they identified four key opportunities to do just that:
- Help sites know how best to showcase their strengths by sharing more information about sponsor recruitment objectives and DE&I targets.
- Help sites prioritize their time by being clear about which trials are accepting applications and which are coming soon but not open yet.
- Help sites know what is needed from them at any point in time by making it crystal clear where sites are in the Inato application process.
- Help sites keep better track of new trials and action items more easily with an aggregate view of all Inato activity delivered to their inbox.
The next step was to translate this list of opportunities into more tactical marketplace features – ones impactful enough that sites would feel the shift in power that’s possible when using Inato. Many rounds of development and user testing led to a transformed “trial selection process” driven by sites and flipping an otherwise broken, laborious, and inefficient process. New features, such as these:
Trial Transparency
To address the first opportunity of helping sites know how best to showcase their strengths through trial transparency, the team created a “Trials to Discover” page. Here sites can gain greater insights into all open trials, including: 1) how many sites the sponsor is seeking 2) how many "seats" remain for sites selected through Inato 3) sponsor diversity goals 4) what percent of the Enrollment Plan can be auto-filled by reusing data from previous applications, and 5) how “popular” the trial is amongst other sites on Inato.
“One of my favorite new features I’ve heard a lot of sites share excitement about is the new 'Popular' badge. We tabulated the site activity on each trial to show sites which ones are 'trending' in popularity. In addition, we now provide a breakdown on the number of sites that are interested in the trial, started an application and number of sites left that can be selected with us. So if you are excited about a trial that’s gaining popularity be sure to get your application in and prioritize it accordingly!” – Alexa Hibbert, Director of Product Management
Visibility Into Future Planned Trials
The team didn’t stop there. They wanted to equip sites with visibility into trials before they even open on Inato. The “Upcoming Trials” page was born with that in mind. Here, sites can see potential trials and, based on high-level information, show interest in the ones they want to see open on Inato. This gives sites the power to shape Inato’s offerings to match their interests and needs.
Status & Progress Clarity
Next, a huge drive for the team was making the application process crystal clear through the new “Trial Application Management” tab. “Sites can follow, in real-time, the progress of their application & get transparent feedback on the sponsor’s decision to select them or not,” said Davarpanah.
Consolidated View of Notifications
Finally, to ensure that Inato was a tool that added value without adding burden, the team created the Weekly Digest Emails. “Sites already have to juggle between dozens of tools,” Davarpanah said, outlining how the addition of digest emails eliminate added burden, “By summarizing all the info in a personalized email digest, sites don’t even have to log into Inato to see what’s new or needed from them.” For Guillocher, this is the most exciting update, “I really believe this will help sites be more aware of new trials they could be interested in without even having to log in on Inato.”
So, with these new updates now live for sites, what’s next for the product team?
“Making it 10x easier for a site to get selected in the right trial through Inato vs. traditional feasibility!” said Davarpanah. He explained that the team is exploring options to immensely reduce the time sites spend on applying to trials by importing and pre-populating more Enrollment Plan (Inato’s trial application tool) data with a goal to allow sites to focus more of their time on their patients and trial results.
“If any sites are interested in this topic, we would love to work with them and get feedback! I can’t emphasize enough how integral our sites were in making these recent updates happen.” Hibbert said. Guillocher adds, “We deeply thank all sites that contributed to this journey.”
Explore all these new features here.
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