The Nurturing of the Clinical Research Coordinator

Abstract

The emergence of the American College of Radiology certifications. Fewer than 40% of those surveyed believe that Imaging Network (ACRIN) as a premier vehicle for clinical trials involving medical imaging and the growth of imaging itself in clinical decision-making are not a coincidence.Medical imaging increasingly finds itself at the point of randomization in clinical trials, as evidence is demanded of its true value in influencing health outcomes. As a cooperative group founded by the National Cancer Institute in 1999, ACRIN now boasts of dissemination of $100 million toward clinical trials (1). The machinery for randomized controlled trials (RCT) comprises a multidisciplinary and multiinstitutional team. One of the most important cogs of this apparatus is the clinical research coordinator (CRC). The CRC is an important complement to the principal investigator in managing various aspects of clinical research. The center stage occupied by ACRIN in imaging-related clinical research and the importance of CRCs in conducting this work have conflated to create a committee that takes a proactive approach with the provision of education, training, and mentoring of CRCs: the ACRIN Research Associate Committee. This committee has endeavored to study the characteristics of the CRCs who are in any way involved in ACRIN-based activities in order to improve quality of research and better inform hiring decisions by institutes participating in clinical trials. The results of their timely survey are presented in the current issue of this journal (2). The diverse activities of theCRC in turn entail a broad skill set, while continuously requiring quality and uniformity. The need for uniformity deserves further emphasis. The generalizability of the results of RCT is, in a large part, determined by strict adherence to protocol by multiple investigators at disparate institutes across many different health systems or even countries. Local practices do vary, but there is some convergence of values stipulated by the institutional review board in the subject of human experimentation.Uniformityofpracticedictates that there should ideally be uniformity of training or, in the very least, a common pathway that is available to those involved in clinical research. There are options available to CRCs to demonstrate proficiency in human subject research and data management, although none of them is specific to research involvingmedical imaging. The survey showed that only 31%ofCRCs have such