Staying in Touch with the Project Posted on December 3, 2007 Study meetings help you keep track of a study and its participants, Michael E. Thase (bio) notes.

So the way we run our larger trials, and frankly, the way on a smaller scale we do our single-site trials, is that each week we have a study meeting in which we review the progress of all the participants in the study, and that gives me a chance to see who’s doing well, who’s not doing well, if the protocols are being followed as they are written, and an opportunity to relate to the staff.

Now, when blinding is involved, blinding meaning that the investigators can’t have knowledge of the particular treatments that the patients are receiving, you do need to do these protocol meetings in a shielded way, so that I know that patient 003 is on treatment A, as opposed to a patient with a certain name or initials is receiving a specific form of treatment.

But nevertheless, it does give you a hands-on way of staying in touch with both the project in an overall sense and with the individual patients. Now, if you can imagine that at one level, and then go macro to the other level; so if it’s a 12-center trial, you can imagine this kind of meeting happening in 12 different places on the same day.

And then two or three days later, the uber-meeting takes place, in which the principal investigators, by phone typically, get together and review the project’s progress at a larger level. Then twice a year, once a year typically, we will get together in person from a bigger-picture standpoint to look at results that may be emerging, deal with issues of safety or protocol revision that might have to be implemented, and as the project moves along, talk about future directions or ways in which we can take what we’ve learned, integrate it, think about how this informs how we practice, and begin to address what the next most relevant question may be.

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