ACRP Fellow Erika Stevens, MA, FACRP, reflects on her ongoing campaign for recognition of the clinical research industry as a profession, how change is the one constant in the industry, and the critical need for robust clinical development activities to treat patients and improve health outcomes.

Clinical Trials Day is an opportunity to recognize the progress of clinical research—but even more so, it is a moment to honor the people and the purpose that continue to move that research forward.

The design of clinical trials is shifting from “one-off” to continuous, or “always-on,” trials. This shift is made possible by the adoption of a range of decentralized clinical trial technologies, real-time data capture, and adaptive trial designs, which encourage flexible models of research. The goal of continuous trials is to offer the potential for continuous data collection, hypothesis generation, and data analysis, and hence the generation of new evidence over time.