The Victorian Teletrial Collaborative – a partnership between the Regional Trials Network-Victoria, AlfredHealth TrialHub, VCCC Alliance, and Safer Care Victoria – has developed a consistent approach to delivering teletrials across Victoria, informing national and international efforts to address equity of access to clinical trials.
The original three organisations joined forces in 2022 under a collective impact model, with Safer Care Victoria joining in 2024, for the greater benefit of priority populations including rural and regional patients, outer metropolitan patients, older Australians, First Nations peoples and those with less common cancers. The group delegated roles and responsibilities by organisation to enhance the collective impact, efficiency, and timeliness of teletrials in Victoria.
The group’s publication, Implementing Teletrials to Improve Equity of Access for Regional Patients With Cancer: Report From the Victorian Teletrial Collaborative, has now been published in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Clinical Oncology.
The publication highlights that a higher return on investment and sustainability can be achieved by adopting a collaborative and evidence-based approach.
By creating teletrial supervision plans, operational templates, toolkits, standard fees and charges, and education and training modules, the group has generated a consistent approach to delivering teletrials across Victoria, positioning Australia as an expert in teletrial methodologies.
A teletrial uses telehealth technology to enable staff at primary trial sites to communicate with those at satellite (or partner) sites. Telehealth can be used for all or some of the trial procedures including screening or follow-up visits. Satellite sites are often more geographically remote, but the model works for metropolitan-to-metropolitan networks, regional to regional, regional to sub-regional and interstate. Internationally, the term Decentralised Clinical Trial is often used, which is a similar version of the Teletrial model, with similarities and differences discussed in the paper.
Teletrials are crucial for regional and rural patients and other priority populations, providing access to potentially life-saving treatments closer to home. Teletrials remove barriers including the emotional and financial burden that comes with travelling to a distant site to participate in a clinical trial.
For the past five years, the expansion and implementation of the teletrial model across Victoria has been a priority for state and federally funded organisations tasked with increasing regional and rural access to clinical trials.
The Victorian Teletrial Collaborative was supported by funding from each of the partners. The VCCC Alliance was funded by the Victorian Government through the Victorian Department of Health.
Safer Care Victoria is the Victorian lead for the Australian Teletrial Program, which is supported by funding from the Australian Government under the Medical Research Future Fund.
Resources: The Teletrial Toolkit resources developed as part of this project are available on the VCCC Alliance website.
