Turning Feedback into Action: Enhancing Site Partnerships

Join us as we explore how AbbVie is turning feedback into action, introducing process efficiencies and enhancing communication with site partners. Sasha Tyndale, Director of Patient Engagement and Inclusion Solutions at AbbVie,  shares valuable insights and actions taken from AbbVie's annual global site feedback survey.  Hear about AbbVie's dedication to being a responsive and collaborative sponsor and how they are fostering stronger site partnerships. 

Transcript

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Jimmy Bechtel 0:00

Welcome and thank you for joining the Society for Clinical Research Sites for SCRS Talks. I'm Jimmy Bechtel, the Vice President of Site Engagement with the Society. SCRS Talks is a program that allows our partners and those that we might work closely with to take a few minutes to address issues of industry concern, share exciting achievements or to learn more about our community. Today, we have Sasha Tyndale, the director of patient engagement and inclusive inclusion solutions with AbbVie here to share a little bit more about what AbbVie is doing specifically in the realm of site centricity. Sasha, it's great to have you with us. Really excited for this conversation and learn a little bit more about what AbbVie is doing in this space. Before we get started, love to learn a little bit more about you and what you do in AbbVie.

Sasha Tyndale 0:47

Sure. Thanks, Jimmy. And thanks so much for having me. It's such a pleasure to be here. So thank you for that amazing introduction. So as you noted, I am a director of patient engagement and inclusion solutions. And so this is an organization that sits within our diversity and patient inclusion team that ladders into our R& D organization. And really my role and the role of my team is to lead the strategy around customer centricity in general within AbbVie, what that ultimately means, How do we measure success there? And how do we leverage the voices of our customer, the diverse voices of our customers, especially to drive impactful business decisions within development within AbbVie? So absolutely happy to be leading this space for AbbVie and just a little bit about me and my background and my history. I've been in the industry for over 15 years and I've held positions within J and J, Novartis before coming to AbbVie and really a lot of my experience was in patient recruitment and enrollment. But really, a lot of that had to also do with how we were working with our sites, right? Because, you know, our sites hold the burden of enrolling our trials for us and driving strong partnership with our sites is a critical Intersection point to really ensuring successful enrollment in our trials. And so, you know, I think that that lended itself really well to my taking over this role and leading that strategy for AbbVie around customer centricity and what that ultimately means for our organization.

Jimmy Bechtel 2:20

That's great. And what I really like about that, Sasha, is that's not only not a common position that I would say most organizations have, so it's great to hear that AbbVie has that continued emphasis on site and patient centricity through evidence as dedicating resources to positions like yours, but it's definitely not one that was around at all just a few years ago. So kudos to AbbVie for the continued resource dedication towards making their work site and patient centric and speaking to that again, emphasizing the fact that AbbVie has emphasized that commitment to building strong partnerships with sites? How does your annual global feedback survey that I know you all issue contribute to understanding site preferences? And what does that do then to improve the collaboration that you have with sites?

Sasha Tyndale 3:07

So our global all investigator survey, it's a survey that we send to our sites every year that focuses on their experience with AbbVie. It really gives us an opportunity to connect with our site partners outside of that individual clinical trial process and really check in on how we're performing as a partner, right? So as much as, you know, within industry, We like to understand how sites are and it's all about picking the right sites, but it's also about how we're showing up as a partner and really making sure that you're being intentional about, you know, asking your partners around how you're showing up and measuring that for yourself. And it really gives our site partners that opportunity to voice their perspective on how things are going. Where are we as AbbVie showing up whether that's well or what are those opportunity areas that we have to improve our ways of working. And so we take that very seriously. We have, you know, dedicated a lot of resources, my, my team specifically, but also have forged partnerships within our organization to really make sure that we're leveraging this and not just you know, getting this feedback and doing nothing with it, but that we're leveraging data to ultimately drive decisions within our business.

Jimmy Bechtel 4:18

That's really cool because I think the important part is that not only are you doing the survey, right? But that you're also what sounds like incorporating directly some of that feedback in and distributing that to the teams as applicable across your organization to help again, improve collaboration and understand some of those site preferences. It's really great because again, we see a lot in the industry. We survey and we ask, but then there's not a lot of action that comes of it. So it's great to hear that you have mechanisms processes in place to turn those insights into action.

Sasha Tyndale 4:52

Yeah, absolutely. It's really important for us to walk the walk and not just talk the talk, right? So we need to be you know, again, leveraging that, that insight that's collected to drive those process improvements for our business.

Jimmy Bechtel 5:06

Totally. I couldn't agree more. So talk to me then, Sasha, a little bit about some of what you've learned from this year's survey. What were some of the key takeaways that you were able to glean?

Sasha Tyndale 5:16

Well, well, first and foremost, I just want to say that we're so grateful for our site partners to take their time out to provide this important feedback. We actually did undergo a pretty big pre launch effort this year to make sure that we were doing our due diligence and streamlining what we capture and collect in the survey. Again, thinking about, site burden and site experience. They're not wanting to take out too much of their time, but still make sure that we're getting, you know, those critical pieces of feedback that we need to to introduce optimization. So just just want to start out saying that that we're so grateful that our sites take the time to complete this every year. In terms of what we saw in this year's survey, we actually saw some incredibly positive writings with our site payments process, which was actually, you know, really huge for us because that was a fairly large focus area for us this year. So we're really pleased to see that the sites are feeling the impact of our work in the space in such a positive way and in short order and I'll probably talk a little bit later in our, in our discussion around how we leveraged last year's survey to really hone in on that as an opportunity area for us. Another area where we saw some really marked improvement was site interactions with our monitors. So those have shown to be very widely, very positive, which is, which is a great rate because we spend a lot of time on training our monitoring team. And we do have an in source model within AbbVie, which we see is something that's really important, right? It gives the sites a direct access to AbbVie. We don't outsource that that group and that organization. It's in house. And so we spend a lot of time training the monitoring team on really how to Cultivate great relationships with the sites and kind of what that means and looks like. So, you know, we're seeing the impact of that as well materialize in the survey results. And while, of course, we saw a lot of really great and favorable feedback in most of the categories that we capture there are also some opportunity areas. So just responsiveness to site queries, for example, I think that that's an area where a lot of, a lot of sponsors Need to put a little bit of more focused efforts, and we're no different. So making sure that we're bringing down those cycle times to be responsive to site queries as an area of focus for us. Study close out kind of bubbled up as another opportunity area for us. So. You know, wanting to do a little bit more of a double click into that and really what that means and what exactly about study closeout has the most pain points and really see again what innovations we can implement there to make that process a bit better and easier for our site partners and then some elements around protocol design. So just making sure that we're. You know, we're clear. There's clarity within our protocols. Everything makes sense, that we're communicating around those effectively. And so, you know, we definitely are taking that in to look at our protocol design process and ways that we can optimize that.

Jimmy Bechtel 8:12

Wow, Sasha, it's, it's great to hear that there were so many insights that you all keyed in onto because they're not unique. I think they're stuff that we hear as well from our sites through our surveys and through our conversations and things like that. So it's awesome to hear actually that those got back to you all and that you are then able to as you have alluded to, take some of those things back again to the teams that I guess influence how those specific aspects of executing a clinical trial are operationalized so that they can make change into those. So it's again, all goes to emphasize and support the emphasis that you all have into these surveys and the work that's being done. And the one thing I too would. Kind of going back to the beginning is not only emphasize the importance of responding to surveys like this, because they are opportunities for learning from our sponsor and CRO partners, but also appreciate the participation that sites have when they do take time out of their day to answer these surveys, because we know that the industry is, is relatively survey heavy. So anytime that you can take some time to answer yet another survey that's great. And it's also, I think, important for us to, again, continue to emphasize the fact that. Organizations like AbbVie are taking those to heart and they're making change as a result of those. So it'll be great to hear what you are, what you have done, and then, you know, maybe re approach this conversation in another six months or a year, Sasha, and see what you have done again as a result of the surveys.

Sasha Tyndale 9:42

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think, you touch on such an important point, right? We are a survey heavy industry. And so I think it's, it's really important. For, you know, sites to understand that we do take this feedback in and we take it very seriously. And it's really an opportunity to have their voices heard and you know, I think that we can do a better job of just closing the loop, right? And not just kind of keeping this to ourselves, but also just making sure that we're sharing with the sites, you know, What are we doing with information that we're collecting from you? What is your time going to in terms of introducing process improvements within a sponsor company like ours. So you know, I think that that's such an important point and that's something that we take very seriously, too. We look at burden. And another thing that we're going to be looking at next year is looking across the company and the corporation around just how many surveys are we sending to sites and are we being thoughtful around those efforts, right? Let's not do that in a silo, but let's also just make sure that different functional groups that are seeking feedback from sites that we're speaking internally so that we can. We can introduce efficiencies in that process.

Jimmy Bechtel 10:59

That's excellent, Sasha. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. So let's dive into that maybe a little bit more specifically. How have the insights from the survey influenced your operational approaches and some of your site focused initiatives? I guess let's get a little specific on what things have changed as a result of what you've heard from the sites.

Sasha Tyndale 11:16

Yeah, absolutely. So, so, like I said, the survey is really integral and giving us visibility to areas where we need to introduce those innovations and optimizations. And so I think a really great example of that in last year's survey, and I alluded to this earlier, is that, you know, uncovered opportunity areas in our payments and reimbursement processes and also just around enhancing some discussions with our site partners around upcoming studies. So that bubbled up as an opportunity area for us last year. And so what we did was, we took the year to dive in and we stood up dedicated cross functional work streams to address these pain points head on. And so, some of the work that has come out of those work streams was you know, established a tiered success measure framework. So we really wanted to look at, what are these opportunities and kind of what does good look like in these areas and let's kind of stand up some measurements and metrics around that so that we can hold ourselves accountable, right. Another piece was that we did a large scale rollout of a payment improvement efforts within the U S. So really looked at our processes within the U. S. Because we are segmented a bit based on you know, geographical location in terms of what those processes are. And we looked at, what are those opportunity areas to introduce some improvements? And so we, we looked at that within our U. S. Space and introduced significant improvements in the payment process that that shaved off some timing. We're also on track to introduce a system to centralize our OUS process. So right, right in the new year, we should have that, that system in place to centralize our OUS processes because we realized that those were decentralized, right? So there was not a cohesive system in place, there was not a cohesive process in place outside of the U. S., and so wanted to make sure that we were centralizing that to introduce efficiencies there. We also have, an internal toolkit that we use that includes materials for our trial teams that they can go to so that again, we're not kind of just starting from scratch all of the time. So we introduce the materials there and some resource guides just to really upskill our clinical trial team partners on things that they need to know about you know, the new processes that we were introducing and, and really to drive that change management within the organization. And then around that pipeline sharing. So, you know, we know that that's important for sites to plan resources, right? If they have some visibility to some programs that are coming up in a particular disease area, then they can start planning ahead of time. And of course, that's not, you know, to necessarily guarantee that they'll be selected per se, but it's good to just kind of give I think a little bit of visibility to kind of what are we working on, right? What are we expected to to come down the R& D pipeline? So having a process in place, that's cross functional. So we pulled in our medical affairs organizations, our clinical development partners, our operations teams. And created a process and we're still iterating on that process, but, creating a process around how can we compliantly share details with our site partners that really helps do what they need to do to be ready should they be tapped with the feasibility questionnaire for for studies that are coming down in short order. So those are just a few of a number of process improvements that we introduced within that initiative. But, resources were dedicated across a multitude of functional areas within AbbVie to really focus on the pain points that that came up out of last year's survey. And so again, as we saw in this year's survey, we saw a significant spike in positivity ratings from our sites around particularly the payment improvement processes that we introduced. So we know that that's paying off. So I think that that's a holistic success. story, right? It shows how you get the feedback from your partners. You do something about it and they're able to feel the impact of that in short order, which is amazing.

Jimmy Bechtel 15:21

Wow. Sasha, again, a tremendous amount of work being done in this space and it's so good to hear that so many different areas have been impacted and, and gained insights from this. One of the things that I would encourage our sites to do. And I know that you all will be receptive to this is, you know, as you're listening sites if you're seeing these things, let us know, let, let AbbVie know. But if you're not seeing these things I think let them know as well, you know, take those surveys and participate. It's obvious that AbbVie in particular is open to this feedback. So I think there's a lot of different aspects of the clinical trials that you might do with AbbVie that might be changing here, if they haven't changed already, will be changing very very soon for the better. So it's great to hear all those different examples. Sasha, as we conclude our conversation here, let's talk a little bit about the future. What can sites expect from AbbVie after providing said feedback through surveys or through some of the conversations that I know you engage with them on in a regular basis and what are your areas of focus then over the next year or two?

Sasha Tyndale 16:24

Yeah, absolutely. So in addition to the areas of focus that I that I spoke to, right, so that responsiveness to site queries looking at our study closeout process and and then just some elements of our protocol design, sites can expect more communication from us. So I think, you know, we touched on this earlier. This is not necessarily new in terms of processes. But what I think is new is us sharing externally around how seriously we take this feedback and what we do with it and then, our commitment to introducing process efficiencies that that can make us a better partner to our sites. So, making sure that we're communicating more about that and more frequently about that is definitely something that sites can expect. One of the things that we're committing to is that in Q1 of 2024, we want to be communicating to our sites around process improvements that they can expect to see from us and coming out of this year's survey. So we will be sending messaging out to our sites around that and we'll be keeping in touch throughout the year. Another thing that we'll be doing this year is driving action plans at the functional level against the feedback. So in addition to having these kind of larger, you know, work stream style initiatives, there's also just some things that our individual teams can do just in their day to day ways of working that can just again, bring that element of site centricity. Into their day to day work. And so working with those teams to put together action plans that again, have their own metrics associated with it. Keeping themselves accountable is work that my team is actually going to be driving this year. And so, you know, I think another thing that will be doing and lastly, I'll just focus on this is that. You know, we don't want to just get feedback once a year um, so taking the time to break things up and do just quick interim pulse surveys or pulse check ins with our site partners is something that we want to introduce again. Nothing to be burdensome, but just a way to You know, along the way, just make sure and test to see, Hey, are we getting better in this space as we're introducing these improvements or, you know, are we seeing a decline? Are we not on the right track? It's just a way for us again to hold ourselves accountable and catch issues early so that we can course correct in real time. So those are just some things that we're focusing on for next year. And we're a learning organization committed to being agile and agility is a pillar for us within AbbVie. So you know, we'll continue to iterate through this, but but we really see our sites as our very important partners. So making sure that we're listening to their voice is critically important for us.

Jimmy Bechtel 19:11

Absolutely. Sasha, I couldn't agree more and I appreciate the continued emphasis that your organization has on that sentiment. I think it's a really great place for us to end our conversation here. So thank you for sharing a little bit about what you're doing and I think giving some insight into what's changing as a result of this very important work that AbbVie is doing and I hope that sites listening are encouraged by the work that you're doing and start to see some of those positive changes. Might be also encouraged then to provide their feedback if they haven't yet done so and their organizations that have or are interested in working with AbbVie. So, thank you for being with us today and again, thank you for sharing those insights.

Sasha Tyndale 19:49

Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Jimmy.

Jimmy Bechtel 19:52

For everyone listening, make sure that you register for upcoming summits being held throughout the year by visiting the summit page on our website, myscrs. org. While you're on our website, I also encourage you to check out our other SCRS publications and resources built for the site community in the publications and resources section of that same website. We appreciate your participation in listening to today's program and look forward to having you join us for more great content coming out soon. Thanks again for listening.