Real-World Oncology Decentralized Trials

So great question.

I think there's always something that sparks an element of knowing that you need change.

And so for a long-standing time, um, I think our research institute has realized that the Phoenix area is quite broad.

Um, us being located in Scottsdale is only a small part of the Phoenix metro area, um, and realized that we just really need a better approach, um, to capture the patients with- within our area.

Um, [lips smack] there's just a huge travel burden associated with it.

Phoenix is such a large area.

Um, and so that is when, like, pre- I think it was in the summer of 2025, there really began discussion about what can we do differently and how can we better, um, help our patients, and then also help ourselves with recruitment.

Cancer centers may believe that in order to do this, they need a major operational overhaul.

Erin, your team took a more incremental approach.

Yes.

What was that first step?

So our first step was that we decided, hey, if we necessarily can't get the patients to come to us, we are going to go to them.

And so we started, um, operating, um, a once-a-day clinic out in our Peoria clinic, um, which is on the opposite side of the valley from where we are located.

So it's probably about, uh, 45 minutes away from here.

And we have a physician that is staffed there, um, who is knowledgeable about clinical trials, who's an, um, a primary investigator, um, and can see patients and consults there.

Kristin, what had to be in place from an operational standpoint before expanding trials into your community sites?

Yeah.

So we focused on a highly centralized model, meaning that the-- everything that touches the patient is happening at the local site.

So think about things like consent, treatment, uh, blood samples, biospecimen processing, tissue collection, all of those things.

Everything else, everything that we consider kind of behind-the-scenes work is happening in a centralized model.

So those things, think about legal, regulatory, budget, contract, um, kit management, PI.

Everything else is done at the, the central level, at the main campus level.

So for our model, we have one PI that oversees all of our sites.

Now, we have lots of sub-Is that report up in different mechanisms to make sure that that person has PI oversight, but we do only have one PI.

We also only use one budget, one contract, and one consent.