There’s a well-known saying that too much choice can be a bad thing. Such as when you go to a grocery store and have to decide between 15 types of canned tomatoes, or when a restaurant menu offers 80 different main courses.

Within the world of clinical trials, however, we should be working on ways to offer patients more choice regarding when and how they take part.

The fundamental premise of Decentralized Trials is to try and provide different options that fit best into a person’s lifestyle. A lot of the focus on DCTs is about the tech, but really it’s about innovative processes that can enable trial participation without the requirement to attend a research site.

Certainly that model of research sites being the focal point for trial operations isn’t going away. But augmenting it with additional options that provide patients with more choice, is surely the direction we want to be heading.