Psychiatry trials are notoriously hard to execute consistently: rater drift, diagnostic variability, and participant dropout create data quality problems that no site-level fix fully solves. Tekton Research’s answer is to centralize the expertise across 17 sites at once, launching a dedicated Psychiatry Team that pairs five physician-investigators with a parallel group of operational leaders covering regulatory, recruitment, and quality functions.
The structure is worth paying attention to. Rather than leaving protocol interpretation to individual sites, the team provides investigator-led review at the study design stage, with physician input on diagnostic requirements, rater selection, and participant access before a single site is activated. That upstream involvement is where psychiatric trials most often accumulate problems that sponsors spend months unwinding later. Tekton’s network runs more than 25 sites across 9 states and has enrolled over 25,000 participants since 2006, so the coverage for applying centralized psychiatric standards is already in place.
The five named physician-investigators span St. Louis, Suwanee, Houston, Englewood, and San Antonio, giving the team geographic distribution across Tekton’s footprint rather than concentration in a single hub. On the operational side, the team includes a PhD-level advanced practice nurse, two directors, and a senior business development contact, which suggests the team is built to engage sponsors at both the scientific and contracting level. Mood, anxiety, addiction, and behavioral health studies are all explicitly in scope, covering the range of indications where rater consistency and retention are most likely to determine whether a dataset holds up at a regulatory submission.
The test of a centralized model like this is whether rater consistency and participant retention actually improve across sites rather than just at the flagship locations. Sponsors considering Tekton for upcoming psychiatric studies should ask for site-level retention data across the 17 participating locations, not just the network average.
Source link: https://tektonresearch.com/introducing-the-psychiatry-team/
Moe Alsumidaie is Chief Editor of The Clinical Trial Vanguard. Moe holds decades of experience in the clinical trials industry. Moe also serves as Head of Research at CliniBiz and Chief Data Scientist at Annex Clinical Corporation.
