Highest Possible Internal Quality Control (QC)

To guarantee the highest quality in the industry, MedAvante devotes enormous resources to train, supervise and calibrate our raters. More than 20% of any MedAvante raters time is spent on internal QC, oversight and calibration activities. No other service provider comes close either in investment in internal quality or a true centralization structure. MedAvante's fundamental competitive advantage is its unique rigorous internal quality control - enabled by a centralized structure.

MedAvante’s centralized expert rater cohort is rigorously trained and calibrated for one fundamental reason: To reap all the benefits derived from achieving the highest possible standardization. MedAvante maintains a tightly calibrated cohort of more than 30 permanent in-house expert raters who work exclusively on MedAvante’s clinical trial assessment projects - ready to bring the highest levels of standardization to your CNS trial.

First and foremost, MedAvante begins by hiring only expert clinicians, and then retrains them to the highest standards before certifying them for work.

MedAvante Centralized expert raters obtained ICCs of 0.90 and higher, using independent interviews. 

 

 

 

 

Each MedAvante rater must interview a patient independently to determine their inter-rater reliability  with the MedAvante expert rater cohort on a particular study scale before certifying them to work on studies using that scale.  

The method traditionally used at investigator meetings significantly overstates reliability and significantly decreases variability. Most ICCs reported today are not true measures of inter-rater reliability.  Typically, ICCs are measured at Investigator meetings having the study’s cohort of raters passively watch and score while someone else, usually an expert, conducts an interview, usually in a videotaped or group setting. Then rater’s score is correlated with the scores of others’ watching and scoring to calculate the "ICC." Whether the watching raters would be able to conduct an effective interview and elicit the same information from the patient is never established. 

MedAvante raters are focused exclusively on either conducting or reviewing clinical assessments and can commit the time required to maintain high levels of accuracy and reliability.