08 Nov Professionals and Patients Offer Mixed Views on Retail Pharmacy Chains’ Enthusiasm About Trials
As several retail pharmacy chains proclaim a rosy outlook for ongoing efforts to expand their services into the clinical trials arena in the wake of the pandemic, traditional study site personnel and patients interviewed on the topic offered more mixed and nuanced concerns about the prospects for near-term success for such ventures.
“With retail pharmacies entering the clinical trial space, investigative sites are left with little information around how this move will affect them or their patients,” says Emily Botto, Senior Research Analyst at the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (CSDD) and a scheduled presenter at the ACRP 2024 conference in Anaheim, Calif. “Retail pharmacies have stated their ability to make clinical trial recruitment and retention more efficient and to increase participant diversity, but no publicly available data exists to support these claims outside the COVID-19 pandemic.”
It is important to understand the perspectives of site staff and potential trial patients to assess the receptivity of the market to retail pharmacy proposals and the perceived viability of these models, notes Botto, who is also a coauthor of a peer-reviewed article on the matter forthcoming in ACRP’s Clinical Researcher journal alongside Tufts CSDD colleagues Hana Do, MPH, Ruby Madison Ford, MPH, and Kenneth Getz, MBA. The team conducted interviews among site personnel and patients in the summer of 2023 to investigate their experience with, awareness of, and receptivity to retail pharmacies being active in clinical trials.
The perspectives of site personnel have been largely absent from existing commentary on pharmacy involvement in clinical trials, Botto says. “Not only are site personnel experts on the services that retail pharmacies are proposing to offer, but they are also the primary stakeholders interacting with clinical trial participants,” she adds. “In order to partner with sites to recruit patients and provide decentralized clinical trial elements, retail pharmacies need to build trusted relationships with sites.” Read more…