For Pharmaceutical Companies & CRO's
The ATRIA™ Database
About ATRIA™
ATRIA™ enables sponsor companies to find the most qualified US clinical investigators for clinical studies based on actual experience and performance data. The Sunshine Act requires that all payments by pharmaceutical companies to any US-based physician, as well as certain other medical professionals, be reported, classified, and verified by that physician. These payments clinical trial grants to both principal and sub-principal investigators.
We assessed these datasets to construct a near census of clinical trial activity by US-based clinical investigators since the latter half of 2014. The data is updated annually, with 2019 currently the most recent available.
With this data, it can be determined, for each clinical investigator:
-
On which clinical trials, and other related studies, the investigator has worked between 2014-2019, and;
-
For which sponsor company; and,
-
A physician’s medical specialty, address; and, vitally-
-
How the physician performed relative to others on each relevant clinical trial.
To determine performance, we establish what percent of the total grant payments an investigator receives. We weigh each investigator’s market power (standardized betas in OLS models), as some investigators are able to command a higher market premium than others. We felt it essential to compare performance within a study in order to control for differences in study design and patient recruitment ease.
We report study-specific performance by quartile, which is by the highest enrolling physicians in a study (first quartile) to lowest-performing (fourth quartile). However, the performance data can be reported in more granularity if desired. To test the validity of our approach we have tracked our predicted performance rankings against previously completed sponsor studies. When we use a gamma ordinal measure, we obtain a positive score of .94, a Spearman rho rank-order score of .92, and a Person’s r metric data score of .93.
ATRIA'S LEADING PERFORMANCE METRICS ALGORITHM (LPMA)
Proprietary data algorithms determine actual relative site patient enrollment performance. A majority of the data within ATRIA comes from Open Payments (Physical Payments Sunshine Act) and ClinicalTrials.gov, enabling our approach for assessment of the site and investigator performance in the U.S.
This produced two outcomes:
-
A near census of investigator enrollment performance since 2014
-
A summary of site experience and performance for all clinical trials conducted in the U.S.
between 2014 - 2020
OpenPaymentsData.cms.gov
Open Payments, a mandatory federal program, collects information about the payments drug and device companies make to physicians and teaching hospitals for things like travel, research, gifts, speaking fees, and meals. Data has been collected from 2013–2016. Open Payments also includes ownership interests that physicians or their immediate family members may have in these companies.
ClinicalTrials.gov
A service of the U.S. NIH, ClinicalTrials.gov is a mandatory registry and database of publicly and privately supported clinical studies of human participants conducted around the world.
Proprietary Sunshine MDTM database
The ATRIA Database combines information from the Open Payments and ClinicalTrials.gov databases and applies proprietary data algorithms to assess investigator performance
The validity of the LPM Algorithm for determining performance scores was established by:
-
Actual CTMS information from two Phase 3 studies
-
Descriptive site performance
-
Actual Patient Enrollment Performance
Data sources
Descriptive Site Performance from Open Payments database and Actual Patient Performance from Sponsor CTMS. The orange figures (in brackets) represent actual site performance.
The y-axis provides the enrollment performance quartile and the x-axis provides the enrollment performance quartile determined via the sponsor's CTMS. The red figures (in brackets) represent actual site performance (from the sponsor's CTMS).
As such, we were able to determine 31 of the 32 top-performing sites (1st Quartile), 31 of the 32-second tier performing sites (2nd Quartile), 27 of the 32 third-tier performing sites (3rd Quartile), etc.