The Lead CRA Blog: You are The Lead CRA: Five Years Later and a New Blog Format

Somehow I managed to completely miss my blog anniversary...by a long shot. I've been the Lead CRA author for over five years and thanks to your collective 250,000+ visits the project has been a personal success and very rewarding. In October of 2007 I started the blog as a place to catalog my adventures in a new regional CRA role and had a tremendous amount of fun shaping the Lead CRA into my personal brand. I published once or twice a month, communicated with many of you via comments and email, mentored several new CRAs to help them kickstart their monitoring careers, began speaking at conferences, and made a lot of valuable professional connections.

Where Did the Time Go?

Along the journey I worked at a couple of excellent CROs and I am grateful for that experience and a series of important managers, mentors, and friends that have all helped shape my career. However, I transitioned from Lead CRA into a Clinical Program Manager role a few years ago. I still interact with monitors and in-house CRAs as part of my role, but I am more rarely on-site where the clinical trials are being performed. When I do travel, I am not monitoring but rather overseeing the operations of many trials within the clinical program. I have relationships with individuals at study sites but in many cases I actually delegate site relationship building and maintenance to the CRA Site Managers, most of whom I do not directly manage. As a result of my evolving role in clinical trials management, I'm finding it more challenging to keep the content here current, relevant, and interesting to CRAs.

What's Next for the Blog?

Actually, I'll be focusing my blogging efforts moving forward on a new project I started last month, the Clinical Operations Toolkit. I invite you to follow along if you are interested in Clinical Trial Management.

I'll pop in from time to time to author a Lead CRA post here and there. I'll still stand by for your emails, review and respond to comments, and we can stay connected on The Lead CRA Facebook page.

Do You Have Something to Say? How about writing the next blog post?

So, this was my blog for over five years, but now it is your blog; you are the Lead CRA.

My vision is for this project to evolve so that the bulk of the new content is generated by you and other CRA or industry experts. You'll start seeing new authors here, beginning this week.

If you'd like to write a post for the Lead CRA blog please contact me via email. I am available to suggest topics and I will help you as needed to write and edit the content. Please join the conversation, you are now the Lead CRA.