Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

Pharmaceutical companies continue to seek ways to reduce resource cost and financial risk by using diverse technology solutions. As you know one of the areas of clinical trial business that has a logistic complexity and resource overhead is Trial management.

Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRS) solves two key aspects : 1. Drug supply chain management and 2. Subject recruitment . A more recent application has been use in advertising directly to trial participants.

Basically IVRS uses telephone as a input device. When a person calls into the number (usually a toll free number) they would be given a series of prompts to choose from and directed to a specific service they would wish to obtain.

Drug supply chain management

IVRS manages medications on a dispensing model, rather than a subject specific model used in regular clinical practice. By being medication-dose centric IVRS can help patients to interactively order trial medications. Note that the patient would come to the clinical site and the investigator or study coordinator would order the required medication. Each order would trigger a electronic message to the drug inventory database, and if the stocks go below certain threshold it can send a fax/email to the stock manager.

Subject recruitment

IVRS can be used to collect data from subjects during recruitment as well as during the study progress.

Integration

IVRS systems are now fully integrated with both the EDC systems and trial logistics systems. This gives lot of benefits to both sponsors and trial participants.