Practical guide to understanding clinical research compliance

Noncompliance with federal regulations, as monitored through institutional review boards for the ethical conduct of clinical research, can occur, even to seasoned investigators. The cause of this noncompliance can be that an investigator is overloaded, does not know the regulations, or does not take the time to pay attention to the details. Sometimes it happens just because of inevitable human error that can befall us all at any time. The authors begin by citing the inherent differences between clinical practice and clinical research. This is followed by an illustration of common noncompliance errors, with examples, followed by general and specific concepts and methods to minimize noncompliance events. The objective of this article is to condense the myriad details involved in conducting clinical research into a set of manageable recommendations that can be recalled easily before and during the research. The material supporting these recommendations comes from years of institutional review board work at several institutions and consultation with experienced principal investigators and their research coordinators.