In recent years, CRIO has experienced rapid growth in interest from countries outside North America. Overall CRIO is present in almost 30 countries worldwide, with over 100 site clients in Europe, and roughly 50 sites in each of Asia and Latin America.
To support our growth, we have or are implementing a number of initiatives:
- By year-end, our system will be available in 6 languages – English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish. Individual users will be able to set their personal language preference, and the entire application (except for eRegulatory, which is being re-designed) will appear in that language. We have the ability, and plans, to expand to additional languages in the future.
- Our system already supports translation of the eSource study template into other languages. We have a bi-directional API to extract a study template (i.e., in English), and ingest one or more translated templates as “sub versions” associated with the original template. This service enables sponsors to translate the original template into multiple languages for publication to sites in different countries.
- With the use of consistent variable and codelist naming structures, we can ensure that all completed eSource data, with the exception of free text entries, can be normalized as numerical or pre-specified values.
- We have a 24/7, multi-lingual Livechat service (staffed with real humans) for customer support. Our Help Center has instruction manuals translated into multiple languages, and our Search feature can accept user questions in any language and then surface only those resources written in the user’s preferred language.
- We have a number of features that ensure our system can support worldwide usage, such as: universal adoption of day-month-year format on all dates; standardization of countries and area codes in patient addresses; support for VAT taxes in our Finance feature; and documentation of GDPR consent and expiration date in our recruiting database.
- From a privacy perspective, we have servers around the world, which allows us to keep PHI local to the jurisdiction. When a sponsor utilizes Central eSource, we aggregate study data across different regions into a single, US-based database for purposes of centralized remote monitoring. Importantly, this is a separate database from the local sites’ eSource, but with no PHI copied over.
CRIO is truly a global platform, with the ability to serve sites anywhere in the world. Sponsors don’t have to wait for site adoption to grow organically – they can accelerate adoption by offering CRIO on their trials to emerging regions as part of Central eSource.