Digital Patient Support Scalability Checklist

Check whether your patient support can scale without becoming generic

Trial Flow Checklist Website Image

Digital patient support needs to reflect the study people are actually taking part in.

If it is too generic, participants may not get the guidance they need to engage, adhere and retain. If it is rebuilt from scratch for every study, delivery becomes slower, more expensive and harder to repeat.

This checklist helps you assess whether your current support model can balance both needs: study-specific support for participants and a repeatable approach for trial teams.

Use this checklist to assess four key areas

  • Value and visibility: Can you see whether patients are using the support, where they drop off, and what value it creates for the study?

  • Scale across studies: Can your digital support be reused across studies, sub-studies, protocol variations, regions and patient groups without starting again each time?

  • Structure across patient journey: Does the support guide patients through the moments that commonly create confusion or disengagement, including what happens next, how to prepare and where to get help?

  • Operational readiness: Can localisation, reviews, reporting and improvement happen through a repeatable process, or does each study still rely on manual work?

The checklist helps you spot where “Partly”, “No” or “Not sure” answers cluster, so you can see whether your biggest gaps are around limited visibility, study-by-study duplication, narrow journey coverage or hidden manual effort.

Why this matters

Digital patient support only creates value if patients use it, sites can work with it, and study teams can learn from it.

Generic tools may be easier to roll out, but they often miss the study-specific details patients need to understand what is expected of them. One-off digital tools may feel more relevant, but they are harder to repeat, compare and improve across studies.

The checklist helps you see where your current model may be limiting impact.

That gives you a clearer basis for deciding what to standardise, what to tailor and what evidence you need to show that digital patient support is improving experience, adherence and retention across trials.

 

Trial team reviewing their retention strategy

Who it's for

This checklist is useful if your team is:

  • Planning digital patient support across multiple studies

  • Reviewing whether current support is too generic, too bespoke, or too manual

  • Preparing an internal case for continued investment

  • Comparing engagement across studies, sites or patient groups