Impact of COVID-19 Outbreak through Telemedicine Implementation on Data Reporting During Oncology Clinical Trials

Abstract

Coronavirus disease outbreak has affected all aspect of clinical care including cancer clinical trials. To minimize exposure of frail cancer patients, an implementation of telemedicine was retained. The impact of this implementation on primary and secondary endpoints criteria of ongoing clinical trials was analyzed. Out of 128 oncology clinical trials, 25 (19%) had an implementation of teleconsultation. Poor data reporting induced mainly a bias on qualitative and descriptive primary endpoints than those assessing efficacy (80% vs 20%; p < 0.001). The integration of telemedicine and E-technologies in the medical practices and clinical trials must be designed and validated.

Keywords:

• COVID19
• telemedicine
• oncology clinical trials
• primary endpoint
• secondary endpoints

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.