Principal investigators of the NIH Collaboratory Trials reported several common challenges to implementation of their studies as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a recent survey. Dr. Emily O’Brien discussed the results of the survey in an interview after the NIH Collaboratory’s annual steering committee meeting.

“Last spring, we started to hear reports of changes in things like care-seeking behavior, research staff working from home, pauses in recruitment at an institutional level,” said O’Brien. “But there wasn’t a lot of information on how these changes affected pragmatic clinical trials specifically,” she said.

O’Brien is a an associate professor in population health sciences at Duke University and a cochair of the NIH Collaboratory’s Patient-Centered Outcomes Core Working Group. View the full interview.

O’Brien and her colleagues at the NIH Collaboratory Coordinating Center conducted a brief survey about the impacts of the pandemic on the NIH Collaboratory Trials, such as challenges they had encountered, solutions they had implemented, and any new measures the study teams had started using. The most common findings were related to delays in trial activities, including training, modifications in the electronic health record, recruitment, and intervention delivery.

“Fortunately, pragmatic trials have a few inherent features that allow them to flex to disruptions that come about from extraneous factors, like those associated with COVID-19,” O’Brien said.

Some study investigators reported that changes in trial implementation had improved their ability to reach a wider audience through virtual interventions. Some also reported renewed commitment from partnering healthcare systems to work together as they encountered challenges in implementation.

“We really think that these silver linings represent lessons learned that can be applied more broadly when we get through the pandemic to help make research more efficient, in line with the Collaboratory’s broader goals,” O’Brien said.