Community Building

To deliver on PCSIG’s vision of broad acceptance of patient centric sampling approaches, we are focused on enabling passionate advocates to work together across organisational boundaries to overcome the hurdles to adoption. To accomplish this, PCSIG has put in place digital mechanisms for the community which facilitate communication of relevant information.

 

PCSIG Website - This is our content repository for communicating to the world what our mission and vision is and how we are achieving this.

 

PCSIG LinkedIn Group - This is the platform through which members of the PCSIG can increase the network of followers and share information with each other, ask for help, etc.  This includes sharing publications, webinar events, conferences, requests for information, ideas, surveys, etc. If you would like to join the PCSIG LinkedIn Group, then please follow the link and request to join.

 

PCSIG LinkedIn Company Page - This is the platform where we share updates about PCSIG activities, including events, webinars, etc. to the broader community beyond the PCSIG LinkedIn Group. Please follow on LinkedIn.

 

Education

The PCSIG is involved in a number of activities to identify and educate stakeholders and decision makers on what patient centric sampling is, what the benefits are and to understand the potential concerns and solutions around implementation of this approach.

 

Webinars – We hold approximately 10 webinars a year from experts in the field, covering various aspects of patient centric sampling where the approach has been applied. These include the perspectives of different stakeholders, including patients, medical and healthcare professionals, analytical scientists, academics, those running clinical trials, policy makers and regulators. These webinars are free to attend and are permanently available.

 

Events – The group occasionally hold in person events to cover particular topics that are best covered face to face. This includes attendance of major scientific meetings to educate key stakeholders on patient centric sampling approaches and events to map out processes that are of broad interest to the community.

 

PCSIG Clinical Trial

This is designed to understand whether at-home versus in-clinic blood sampling has an impact on the rate of recruitment and retention into clinical trials.  If demonstrated, this could have a potentially large impact on the way that clinical trials are run. The clinical trial is currently actively recruiting and the outcomes will be published in the scientific literature.

 

PCSIG Diagnostics Working Group

This group is a collection of professionals involved with diagnostic laboratories and the associated processes, who have a passion for integrating patient centric sampling approaches into their workflows, where they might bring benefit to patients.

 

Devices Listing

This team have developed and maintain a listing on the PCSIG website of currently available patient centric blood samplers. The team are currently building additional listings of other patient centric sampling technologies and solutions, including lancets, urine, CSF, interstitial fluid, etc.

 

Publications

The PCSIG aims to publish output from their activities and other topics, where relevant. The following publications are in the pipeline for development.

• Strategies for generating bridging data for diagnostic and other assays between samples collected from capillary blood compared to standard venous phlebotomy.

• Examples of cost benefit analysis for patient centric sampling approaches compared to standard in-clinic based blood collection.

 

Patient and Clinician Surveys

Getting feedback on a novel approach and workflows is important and we will be looking to prepare appropriate patient and clinician surveys and collate the responses for publication. This will give us a common platform with shared questions. In addition to removing the burden of questionnaire development, the use of common questions will increase the number of respondents to each question, making these responses more statistically viable. Once finalised, these survey questions will be made available on the PCSIG website.

 

Want to get involved?

If you are interested in finding out more about any of our activities and getting involved, or have suggestions for other activities, then please contact us at contact@pcsig.org.