How Capsicure uses Greenlight Guru to run more studies with less travel and expense

Who is Capsicure?

Capsicure is a full-service CRO headquartered in Hazelwood, Missouri, specializing in wound care research. The team runs randomized controlled trials, real-world evidence studies, and regulatory submissions through a national network of clinical sites. Capsicure delivers high-quality, efficient, and impactful clinical trials that drive innovation and improve patient outcomes in wound care and beyond.

Choosing an EDC for the first time

Capsicure’s Chief Scientific Officer, Marissa Docter, MD, RN, BSN, and President, Brian Springer, have worked together for the past decade, first at the site level and now as part of a CRO. 

At a site, an EDC is handed to you. The sponsor or the CRO picks the platform and the coordinators live with whatever they get, which over the years meant learning the quirks of several systems: one that required principal investigators to sign off patient by patient with no bulk option, another that issued a separate login for every single study.

When they finally had the chance to choose an EDC for themselves, Marissa and Brian were well acquainted with many of the industry options. What drew them to Greenlight Guru was its ease of use for site staff, the reasonable price point, and the fact that the system worked well with their specialization in wound care. 

But one of the most important features that led them to choose Greenlight Guru was the remote monitoring capabilities. 

What a site visit actually costs

Source verification is the work that drives monitor travel. Someone has to confirm that what’s in the EDC matches what’s in the patient's chart, and historically that meant putting a person on a plane.

The budget math is straightforward enough: travel time, airfare, a hotel, a rental car, meals. All of that could easily add up to a $100,000 travel allocation that a sponsor has to fund. Then there’s the day itself, where that monitor belongs to one site and can’t do any other work.

The second cost is harder to put on an invoice. A traveling monitor isn’t answering calls from other sites or moving queries on other studies, so that work shifts to whoever stayed behind. For a lean team, that creates a serious constraint on how many studies can run at once.

Greenlight Guru Clinical solves monitor travel

But with Greenlight Guru, at the end of a visit, the site enters the data and is prompted on that same page to upload the source for the visit, including informed consent. That puts the entered data and the uploaded source in one place. Monitors open both remotely, check them against each other, and close the visit out. Everything stays stored where it was reviewed, so at the end of the study the record is already assembled rather than reconstructed from two systems.

According to Brian, Greenlight Guru has brought the time and money they spend on monitor travel “pretty much down to zero.” And that’s not just a savings for the CRO.

Three weeks to a functional study

Sponsors rarely have a strong opinion on what EDC a CRO uses. What they do care about, and ask about, is how fast the study can be live and how soon the first patient can be enrolled. And the EDC a CRO chooses has a significant effect on that timeline.

With Greenlight Guru, Capsicure can have a functional study built and ready to go three weeks after kickoff. When other vendor timelines are measured in months, that’s a meaningful savings in time and money for the sponsor.

Price works the same way. An EDC may not be the most expensive part of a study, but every line item has to be defended on its own merits. Capsicure can tell sponsors that not only is Greenlight Guru competitive on cost, it has the same features and functionality as other industry options whose cost is prohibitive.

A lasting relationship

Clinical research has a turnover problem, and Brian has watched it play out across vendors for most of his career. Teams change, relationships reset, and the institutional knowledge about your business walks out with whoever is leaving.

Three  years into the relationship, Capsicure is still working with the same Greenlight Guru support contacts and the same design team that built its first study. The people helping fix an amendment today are the ones who built the form in the first place.