Avoca Group announces key initiatives for outsourcing consortium

Avoca's outsourcing group has set out its key goals for 2013.

Clinical outsourcing specialist the Avoca Group has announced the key initiatives for its Quality Consortium, which aims to enable members to optimise their approaches to outsourced clinical trials and quality management.

Launched in January 2012, the consortium brings together executives from pharma, biotech and clinical research organisations to improve the rate of development of best practice approaches to quality management.

Looking ahead to 2013, it will focus on research assessments of ways to manage risk in outsourced clinical trials, looking particularly at how its members' approaches compare to overall industry standards.

Patricia Leuchten, president of Avoca, said: "Our overarching goal is to help our diverse members strike the right balance between meeting timelines, ensuring cost containment and achieving the highest level of quality in their clinical trials.

"We made tremendous progress during our first year and are now poised to expand the scope of this critically important work."

The Quality Consortium will also produce guidelines and tools for members on effective oversight, revisions and refinements to its quality agreement and metric tools.