The Clinical Trial Industry’s Approach to Baking Bread

Here’s how the clinical trial industry would approach baking the best bread.

The bake shop owner would send out a job posting for a baker but wouldn’t tell them what type of bread they’d be baking. The fastest baker to respond would be hired.

After they were hired, the baker would be informed that they would have to pay for some ingredients themselves and it would come out of the baker’s salary. When the baker asked for more money to these expenses, the owner would mumble something about fair market value and refuse to cover the additional costs.

The owner would hire a company to supply the remaining ingredients, but the ingredients would often arrive late, or the wrong ingredient would be sent instead.

The owner promised to fully stock the bakery with everything the baker would need to bake bread, but the baker would discover that the mixer didn’t work, and it would take 4-6 weeks to get a replacement. In the meantime, the baker would have to mix by hand.

To solve the problem, without getting the baker’s input, the owner would hire a vendor to install a sophisticated computer and robotic baking system to streamline the baking process and enable the baker to make 3 times as much bread every day. However, the company that designed the system had never consulted with a baker during their design phase and had the assembly line adding ingredients in the wrong order. It also had different components that would stop working every day and the baker would spend hours on the phone with IT support.

The owner would hire an advertising agency to bring in customers and they’d be lined up out the door even though the baker didn’t have the ingredients to make the bread that day. The customers would get frustrated and leave and the owner would grill the baker on why they didn’t sell any bread that day.

The owner would require the baker to draft a plan to get and keep customers but couldn’t guarantee that ingredients would arrive on time and refused to address the problems with the automated assembly line.

The owner would require the baker to send weekly sales reports even though the owner had access to the bakery’s financial system and could review directly.

The owner would hire a consultant to find out why they weren’t selling more bread and would pay the consultant 10 times what the baker is being paid. The consultant would tell the bake shop owner that the problem was the Baker and that they needed to find a different one.

Even though the baker was incredibly talented, having had such a terrible experience, the baker would stop baking bread forever.

And we wonder why physicians participate in one study and never do another.

This analogy was the topic of discussion between Liam Eves and Ted Trafford on an episode of the Innovating Clinical Trials Podcast: EP6 The Clinical Trial Industry’s Approach to Baking Bread.

Click the link to listen to the full podcast.