United States-based Signant Health has acquired VirTrial, a company that provides software solutions for remote site start-up and decentralised clinical trial conduct, it was reported on Monday.

The acquisition will provide Signant Health with VirTrial's tele-research platform, which includes secure video, audio, chat, and connected medical device capabilities for decentralised patient-site interaction and evaluations and Virtual Site Monitoring to address remote site start-up and monitoring.

Roger Smith, chief executive officer, Signant Health, said, 'COVID-19 has created a widespread and urgent need for contingency planning in clinical trial operations and has forever changed how our industry plans and executes trials. Signant and VirTrial are passionate about supporting the trial ecosystem with software, analytics, and logistics solutions to conduct studies and generate data across all modalities while improving, respecting, and honouring the role investigators and coordinators play in collaborating with patients to advance clinical research. VirTrial's platform is a critical component in our strategy to truly digitise the operations of clinical study sites and bring uniform conduct and evidence generation through a comprehensive set of integrated study management software and services.