Juggling sponsors, investigators and suppliers on top of a single budget when putting together an investigator meeting, as every project or site manager and clinical trial manager knows, is not an easy feat. This white paper provides a list of considerations to take into account when planning an investigator meeting or hiring an agency.

Start with a destination

Choosing the right destination and venue involves taking into account a myriad factors. How does one city compare to another? Flight connections? Hotel capacity? What if a perfectly connected destination means being located on the outskirts of the city? Do splendid hotel locations merit longer airport transfers? All these before we even introduce cost as a parameter. City A with venue A is much more expensive than city A with venue B, not to mention city B with venue A.
Penta clients get their options laid out for them within a week with several budgets ready to be sent to the sponsor company. Everything is there: the pros and cons of each destination along with the cost of flights from each city your investigators arrive from.

Manage the investigators

Handling all the investigators with their individual needs is very time-consuming and can easily get out of control. As more and more sites are included, it becomes increasingly difficult to sort out the requests and who they originated from. To solve this, we built our own investigator meeting solution. A platform built for meetings, where every meeting gets a dedicated website containing the programme and every attendee gets a detailed questionnaire (place and date of travel, food preferences etc.). Everyone included in the project can track how many investigators have registered, from where, what their needs are and, most importantly, the cost of the meeting compared to the budgeted amount.
It fixes budget control and transparency, along with the response rate.

Get your materials in order

Deliver them in a binder or on a USB stick, while we set up the venue and handle registrations, while our project managers and the entire supporting team take care of our investigators. Focus on protocol requirements or KOLs attending. You can relax and talk to your investigators, exchange opinions and make sure everyone understands the protocol and are happy to participate in the study. When the meeting is all over, we collect all the receipts and data, and handle travel expense reimbursements.