Most staffing conversations in clinical research operations run on intuition: a coordinator feels overloaded, a director senses a site is stretched thin, but nobody has a number to point to. Fox Chase Cancer Center set out to change that.
Presented at the AACI Cancer Research Institute meeting, the work applied TRIALNAV's staffing acuity methodology across Fox Chase's actively enrolling oncology portfolio, turning trial complexity, workload distribution, and resource utilization into a single, comparable score instead of a collection of spreadsheets and gut checks.
The result gave leadership a data-driven basis for staffing decisions that had previously relied on manual estimation, replacing "this feels like a lot" with an actual number leadership could act on.
Presented and reviewed in a rigorous academic setting, the abstract validated the underlying methodology itself, not just its usefulness in one clinic. That distinction matters for any operations leader who needs more than internal confidence when making the case for headcount, workflow changes, or a new system to leadership.
