Princeton, NJ (PRWEB) June 01, 2015
The Avoca Group, a leading research and consulting firm in the pharmaceutical industry, has established a first-of-its-kind online community to support collaborative initiatives to bring new and innovative quality management approaches to clinical trials. The community, created by the Avoca Quality Consortium (AQC) and hosted on Sprinklr’s Get Satisfaction platform, brings together clinical research professionals from 46 pharmaceutical companies and service providers to drive quality and innovation in outsourced clinical trials.
Aha! launched at the May 13th Member-Only Working Session of the fourth annual Avoca Quality Consortium Summit, sponsored by Platinum Sponsor inVentiv Health, where more than 100 pharmaceutical industry leaders from AQC Member companies worked together to create and post content to Aha!. The community provides Members with a private and secure platform on which to collaborate, ask questions, and access tools and information about proactive quality management, risk mitigation, and innovation in outsourced clinical trials.
The idea for Aha! emerged from discussions with AQC Member Executives about how to harness the power of social media and the collective knowledge of the Consortium membership to drive continued improvements in the oversight and quality of clinical trials. Specific anticipated uses for the community include the optimization of the Consortium’s leading practices and support for the socialization of forward-thinking approaches to quality and risk management within companies, topics that are particularly important to the industry today.
“The complexity of clinical development today is far greater than it was even five, let alone ten, years ago. That complexity has driven a higher need to ensure quality,” said Robert Metcalf, Ph.D. Vice President, Global Regulatory Affairs at Eli Lilly and Company. “I see the community helping us to better manage clinical drug development complexity by understanding and having consistency around how we manage quality.”
“The launch of the AQC Community Platform, Aha!, is an important milestone for the Consortium,” noted Patricia Leuchten, President and CEO of Avoca. “Our Members now have the opportunity to tap into the collective intelligence and experience of AQC's vast membership base for the purpose of making improvements in the way Members approach quality and risk management in outsourced clinical trials. This will not only benefit individual Member companies, but it also has the potential to shape the way we approach quality and risk as an industry in the future.”
Leuchten continued, “Aha! is in keeping with the Consortium's vision of meaningful progress through collaboration. We're excited that, while we only recently launched, there are already over 80 separate conversations taking place between Members on this online forum on important topics related to strategic innovation and clinical trial execution, proactive approaches to quality and risk management, and Avoca's initiatives focused on improving the process of pre-qualification of suppliers.”
About The Avoca Quality Consortium:
Led by The Avoca Group and sponsored by Eli Lilly and Company and Pfizer Inc., The Avoca Quality Consortium brings together quality, outsourcing, and operational professionals from Member pharma and biotech companies, CROs, and specialty clinical service providers to accelerate the development of leading practices and industry standards for proactive quality management and risk mitigation in clinical research. Through Avoca’s benchmarking of leading practices and the formation of an industry consortium focused specifically on quality management, Members work to improve the quality and outcomes of outsourced clinical trials.