Highest Possible Internal Quality Control (QC)

To guarantee the highest quality in the industry, MedAvante devotes significant internal resources to train, supervise and calibrate our raters. MedAvante’s fundamental competitive advantage is its unique rigorous internal quality control – enabled by a centralized structure. No other service provider invests in internal quality or a true centralized structure.

First and foremost, MedAvante begins by hiring only expert clinicians, and then retrains them to the highest standardization before certifying them for work on trials. MedAvante has rigorous ongoing internal quality checks of its raters’ calibration with each other on scoring accuracy to ensure the benefits derived from achieving the highest possible standardization.

MedAvante centralized raters uniformly and consistently obtain intra-class coefficients (ICC) of their inter-rater reliability ≥ .90 across therapeutic scales. ICCs are computed from a rater conducting a study interview themselves.

The method traditionally used at investigator meetings significantly overstates reliability and significantly decreases variability. Typically, ICCs are measured at Investigator meetings by having the study’s cohort of raters passively watch and score while someone else, usually an expert, conducts an interview. Frequently, a group of raters at Investigator meetings watch and score the same interview, often a videotape. This significantly minimizes variability by using only one interview, versus interviews by each rater, to calculate the reliability of a group. Whether the watching raters would be able to conduct an effective interview and elicit the same information from the patient is never established.