Your start-up metrics are missing something. The slowest sites take 3 to 5 times longer than the fastest, and one of the most important steps barely gets measured.
Ask most sponsors where a trial loses time before the first patient is enrolled, and the answer is usually contracts and ethics review. But those milestones are built from dozens of smaller tasks happening inside the site, largely out of view.
In this article for Pharmaceutical Outsourcing, CRIO Co-Founder and Co-CEO Raymond Nomizu breaks start-up down task by task, using 12 months of U.S. site data, and shows where the real delays hide.
What You’ll Learn
- Why the median misleads. The averages look fine. The tails tell a very different story.
- How four common start-up activities compare between top-quartile and bottom-quartile studies, from regulatory packages to first patient screened.
- The start-up step sponsors rarely see. One task with major downstream impact almost never shows up in tracking.
- Why multi-site trials run on the slowest sites’ clock, and what that means for your timelines.
- Practical steps for sponsors and CROs to narrow the gap and return weeks to the start of every study.
Who Should Read This
Clinical operations leaders, sponsors, CROs, and site network teams looking for a clearer view of where start-up time is actually lost.