- Specializing in Creating Customized IVRs, Voice, SMS, Chat and HIPAA Compliant Secure Message Applications
Specializing in Creating Customized IVRs, Voice, SMS, Chat and HIPAA Compliant Secure Message Applications
IVR and SMS ePRO for Clinical Trials
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Healthcare Solutions
If you're in healthcare, you owe it to yourself to learn how you can make your everyday business processes more efficient and save money at the same time. We can help in automating many of your routine and repetitive tasks, including Patient Engagement surveys.
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Transportation Solutions
If you're in the transportation business, you can automate many of your routine tasks like package notifications, surveys, collection calls and more. Improve your customer satisfaction by extending your service hours without extending your costs.
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Patient diaries, check-ins and reminders by phone call, text message and secure link
Some participants will happily download a study app. Plenty won’t. Older adults, people on prepaid phones, shift workers, and anyone who simply doesn’t want another app can still answer a two-minute call or reply to a text. IVR Lab builds that side of your data collection: scheduled diary calls, a call-in line, SMS check-ins and secure survey links, all set up to match your visit schedule and your data spec.
We’re a small, specialist team, and custom work is the reason we exist. An odd dosing schedule. A language most vendors don’t offer. A site that needs its own caller ID. A diary that has to start the moment your EDC or randomization system enrolls someone. When other vendors say no, we usually say yes, and then we show you exactly how it will work before the first participant is enrolled.
Planning a clinical trial IVR or participant reminder workflow?
Share your schedule of assessments, draft questionnaire, or patient communication flow. We will review it and outline a practical approach.
Request a workflow review
Who we work with
- Early-stage biotech and medtech sponsors running a first or second study without a large eClinical budget or an in-house tech team.
- Small and mid-size CROs that need a phone and text channel for one study, or for a client who asked for it. We work alongside your team as a specialist technology partner and stay accountable for the part we build.
- Decentralized and hybrid trial providers that need a dependable route for participants who can't or won't use an app.
- Academic trial offices and investigator-initiated studies that need structured phone or text data collection, often across several hospitals.
Three ways participants can respond
Most studies use more than one. A participant might get a text reminder, answer a call for the daily diary, and open a secure link for a longer questionnaire once a month.
- Scheduled outbound calls at the time each participant prefers
- An inbound call-in line, toll-free or local, for participants who would rather call when it suits them
- Keypad answers for structured questions, spoken answers when you want the participant's own words
- Spoken answers recorded and transcribed, with the original audio retained
- Custom caller ID, so participants recognize the study when it calls
- Short check-ins and yes or no, or even open-ended questions answered by reply text
- Reminders for doses, diaries and visits
- Set up to keep protected health information out of the text itself
- A text or email with a link to a secure survey page
- Participant authentication before any data entry
- A better fit for longer instruments, free-text answers and anything that shouldn't sit in a text thread
Email and web chat surveys are available too, if your protocol calls for them. Our page on SMS and hybrid secure messaging for patient-reported outcomes goes deeper on when to use each.
Study workflows we set up
- ePRO and patient diaries: daily, weekly or event-driven, with questions that branch on earlier answers.
- eCOA support workflows: a phone or text route alongside your main eCOA system for participants who need it.
- Medication adherence check-ins: dose confirmation, missed-dose reasons and reminders. See medication adherence and dosing diaries by phone and text
- Visit reminders and pre-visit screening questions ahead of site visits.
- Post-procedure and device follow-up calls at set intervals after surgery or an implant.
- Adverse event screening prompts that send answers needing attention to the site by email. Your clinical team reviews them and decides what happens next.
- Long-term follow-up and registries, where participants need contact for months or years.
- Standard instruments such as PROMIS and FACIT, delivered by voice or text where your license and study design allow.
Schedules that follow the protocol
- Rolling enrollment, so each participant's schedule starts on their own day 1
- Changes by study day, for example a daily diary for two weeks, then weekly, then monthly
- Patient-specific call times and contact windows
- Twice-daily calls or texts for twice-daily dosing
- Retry rules for unanswered calls, plus callback requests when a participant asks to be called later
- Nonresponse tracking, so coordinators can see who has gone quiet before it turns into a missed visit
- Escalation emails to the right site contact when an answer needs a person to look at it
Multi-site studies without the cross-talk
Each site can be set up as its own account inside the study. That keeps access clean and makes site-level reporting simple.
- Separate users and logins for each site
- Separate participant lists, so coordinators see their own participants only
- Site-specific escalation email addresses and caller IDs
- Site-level exports, plus a combined view for the sponsor or CRO
Data your team can actually use
Output can be organized in a number of different formats to comply with privacy and regulations.
- Patient ID and Site ID
- Call or message date and time
- Answers, question by question
- Dose taken status and missed-dose reason, where used
- Safety screening responses
- Recording reference for spoken answers
- Export timestamp
- CSV exports from the portal
- Scheduled SFTP delivery
- API integration when the study needs it, with documentation provided under a signed MSA
- Formats for a specific EDC, reviewed with your data manager during setup
Custom integration with your EDC and randomization systems
Your EDC and randomization (RTSM) systems run the study. We run one small part of it: the patient-facing surveys, diaries and check-ins. Our team has the experience to build custom integrations between the two, so outreach follows what happens in your systems and nobody re-keys data. What’s possible depends on which EDC and RTSM you use, so we scope each integration with your data manager instead of promising a ready-made connector.
- Your EDC or RTSM sends an event, such as a new enrollment, a randomization date or a schedule change.
- We start the right surveys and reminders for that participant, on the schedule the event calls for.
- Answers go back to your system by Patient ID, with the call or message details your data manager needs.
- A withdrawal or status change in your system can stop or change that participant's outreach.
- Randomization, treatment assignment, kits, drug supply and blinding stay in your RTSM and with your team. We don't provide them.
- We only need the fields that drive outreach, such as Patient ID, site and key dates, not treatment assignment.
- Your EDC stays the study database.
- The integration spec is agreed in writing and tested in UAT before go-live, with API documentation shared under a signed MSA.
Audit-enabled surveys for regulated studies
When a study needs a full record of what was asked and answered, we run it in regulated study mode. Every material change is logged with who made it, when, the value before and after, and why. Each published version of the survey is frozen and fingerprinted, and every response is linked to the version that produced it. Responses can’t be edited or deleted by anyone, our own staff included.
These controls were built for 21 CFR Part 11 studies, and we back your validation with documentation and hands-on support. The details are on our page about audit-enabled surveys for clinical trials.
Languages and data residency
- Multi-language capability, including Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese, German, Chinese, Hindi, Farsi, Armenian, Korean, Filipino and Vietnamese; With translated prompts and either recorded voice prompts or text-to-speech.
- In regulated studies the translated wording is part of each frozen version, so you can show what a participant heard in their language
- Canadian data residency for studies that need participant data hosted in Canada.
- Local and toll-free numbers so participants can call a number they trust
Security and privacy
- Encryption in transit and at rest.
- User permissions by role and by site.
- Time-limited links to audio recordings.
- Secure links and authentication when answers shouldn't travel by plain text.
- Safeguards for HIPAA-covered work. See our HIPAA page
- Secure links and authentication when answers shouldn't travel by plain text.
- SOC 2 audited infrastructure. See SOC 2 at IVR Lab...
We review the schedule of assessments, questionnaires, sites, languages and data spec, and tell you plainly what we can and can’t do.
We write the call and text flows, branching and schedules, and share them for your approval.
Prompts are translated and recorded, or set up with text-to-speech, for each language in the study.
A small group tries the calls and texts before launch. We fix whatever confuses them.
Your team tests against the spec and signs off.
Mid-study changes go through the same approval, and in regulated studies each one becomes a new frozen version.
Final exports and audit records are delivered, and retention is handled as agreed in writing.
Questions sponsors and CROs ask
Talk to us about your clinical trial IVR requirements.
Send us your protocol schedule, questionnaire, or patient communication plan and we will tell you how we would approach the workflow and what inputs we would need from your team.
Discuss your study workflow