Beyond The Pandemic: Why eCOAs Are Here To Stay

By J.C. Wilson, Product Manager, IQVIA eCOA

Electronic Clinical Outcome Assessments (eCOAs) were already an essential and fast-growing part of clinical research prior to the pandemic. eCOAs are digital tools that sponsors use to remotely capture patient experience data, giving sponsors the ability to obtain near real-time data and access to study trends. These tools brought new data and insights to the research landscape while reducing the data collection burden for patients and site staff.

During the pandemic, when patients could no longer visit trial sites, eCOA quickly became the ‘go to’ measure for collecting patient data in vaccine trials and helped sites maintain compliance through the crisis. These electronic tools are being used to track patients’ drug and protocol compliance and monitor the quality of life measures and the day-to-day behavior conditions.

This experience showed sponsors and sites just how valuable eCOAs can be over paper data collection. The constant, real-time flow of data brings many key benefits to trials that go beyond crisis mitigation.