Regulatory Coordinator
Full course · The Regulatory Coordinator: Role, Scope & Professional Identity
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Addresses the RC role in resource-constrained settings where the RC may also serve as lead CRC and must build regulatory infrastructure from scratch
The first thing to understand about being a regulatory coordinator at a community practice or small health system research program: you are probably also the clinical research coordinator. And the regulatory binder librarian. And the IRB submission specialist. And the person who remembers to order lab kits, track temperature logs, and remind the investigator that three continuing reviews are due next month.
The second thing to understand -- and this is the more important point -- is that this arrangement is not sustainable, and ICH E6(R3) gives you the framework to explain why.
The previous two lessons examined settings with dedicated infrastructure: the academic medical center, with its institutional IRB, research administration office, and department-level governance; the dedicated research organization, with its standardized SOPs, performance metrics, and volume-optimized workflows. Those environments have their own challenges, but resource scarcity is not among them. The community practice operates in a fundamentally different reality. Research is not the institutional mission -- patient care is. There is no research administration office. The institutional IRB, if there is one, may be affiliated with a health system partner rather than housed at the practice itself. The investigator is a clinician who entered research because patients needed access to novel therapies, not because the practice's business model depends on enrollment revenue.
And the regulatory coordinator -- if the site has one at all -- inherits a research operation that was likely built through accretion rather than design. Studies were added one at a time. Each coordinator developed their own filing approach. Nobody wrote SOPs because nobody was doing enough studies to justify the investment. The regulatory binders might be in the investigator's office, the coordinator's desk, and a shared network drive -- none of them organized the same way.
This is not a lesson about surviving that chaos. That would be CRC-level guidance, and it is not what this course teaches. This is a lesson about designing the regulatory infrastructure that replaces the chaos -- about building, from the ground up, an operating system that can support six active studies with one or two staff members and still meet the same E6(R3) obligations that a 30-study academic medical center meets with a team of twelve.
The question is not whether E6(R3) applies to you. It does. The question is how to apply it proportionately.
What you will learn3 objectives
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:
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