Article by Yuan Valk
ResearchManager
Ask anyone working on clinical trials what takes up most of their time, and the answer is rarely “research.”
It is chasing approvals, reconciling spreadsheets, re-sending documents lost in email threads, and correcting errors introduced along the way. This is the hidden cost of running clinical trials on fragmented, analogue systems.
A pattern the evidence keeps confirming
Clinical trial setup times in the UK currently stand at around 250 days, and the friction is rarely scientific in origin. Site activation delays, document backlogs, sequential approval workflows, and slow patient recruitment are consistently identified as the binding constraints. For NHS-affiliated organisations, every hour absorbed by manual reconciliation or email-based document tracking is an hour not spent on patient-facing activity.
Where the friction builds up
The problem is rarely one system in isolation. It is the accumulation of small inefficiencies across the trial lifecycle that compounds into a significant drag on capacity.
Data collected on paper or in local spreadsheets has to be re-entered, checked, and reconciled before it is usable. Each re-entry step introduces the possibility of error. Errors require queries. Queries require responses. Responses arrive by email, get filed in the wrong folder, and the cycle repeats.
Document management follows a similar pattern. Trial master files maintained across shared drives and email attachments make version control difficult, and audit readiness a manual effort rather than a baseline condition. When inspectors ask for a document trail, assembling one takes days rather than minutes.
Regulatory correspondence, site activation, and amendment tracking each carry their own administrative overhead, and in most organisations running trials on legacy systems, these processes run in parallel without talking to each other. The result is duplicated work, inconsistent records, and a coordination burden that falls disproportionately on the people who are least well placed to absorb it: research nurses, trial coordinators, and site staff.
Patient recruitment is a further source of delay that is often underestimated. When screening relies on manual referral review and coordination happens by phone and paper, reaching target enrolment takes far longer than necessary, with no systematic overview of where bottlenecks are forming.
What a different approach to Clinical Trials looks like
The NHS Ten-Year Plan is clear: reducing administrative burden on clinical staff is a precondition for expanding research capacity. But the shift from fragmented systems to integrated ones requires tools designed around how research actually works.
Organisations that have moved away from spreadsheet-based data collection towards integrated digital platforms report that the gains are not primarily in speed, though that follows. The more immediate benefit is visibility: knowing where a study stands at any given moment without having to chase five people across three email threads.
This is a pattern we have seen consistently over the past 13 years. We are ResearchManager, a SaaS solution for clinical trials, offering the Clinical Research Suite: a unified platform supporting clinical operations and clinical data management, for academic and healthcare organisations as well as CROs and sponsors.
That experience is what we want to bring to the Medilink Network.
How Research Manager can help
On study set-up, our platform helps eliminate the fragmented workflows that push timelines beyond 300 days, supporting the UK government’s ambition to bring that average down to 150. On patient recruitment, we replace manual screening and ad hoc coordination with a single workflow: QR codes and web links to reach patients, predefined inclusion criteria, automated screening, and a real-time enrolment overview, supporting the NHS 30-day target to recruit the first participant into commercial studies. On data, RM Insight allows principal investigators to query their own trial data in plain English, without needing a data scientist and without data leaving the Trust’s own environment. That puts real-time insight directly in the hands of the people running the trial.
The goal, across all of this, is to accelerate the clinical validation process and enable more patients to gain faster access to better treatments.
If your organisation is ready to explore what that looks like in practice, find us at my-researchmanager.com/en/.