Are Performance Metrics About Doing the Right Things or Simply Doing Things Right

Performance metrics in the clinical trials sector need to be re-imagined so they are better designed to improve study quality. They should become standardized across the industry to benchmark productivity, so that stakeholders can measure project and protocol risk from the beginning. To be effective, performance metrics are aligned with critical success factors and key performance questions, along with metrics that answer them. Driving this effort are industry initiatives and regulatory agencies that encourage greater risk mitigation and management techniques early on. This shift emphasizes using performance metrics to do the right thing to improve operations, which is a departure from simply doing things right—namely, measuring things in check-box fashion.