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While consolidating the industry may not have been the goal of independent IRBs, the number of small and family owned IRBs continues to shrink.
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As the use of central IRBs grows nationally, these models are increasing consistency in IRB review, but they also are causing some confusion for institutional IRBs.
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Thanks to the rise in private equity ownership, the number of independent IRBs may be shrinking, but the number of services they offer is greatly expanding.
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Small IRBs often have a resource dilemma: How do you help the IRB improve consistency and quality of reviews when staffing is limited?
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The 21st century IRB office is run by professional-level staff more than in previous years. While 30 years ago an IRB could rely on a long-time employee who had experience without credentials, this model is becoming rare.
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Research institutions sometimes struggle with retaining experienced IRB members as the workload can be significant and there are so many competing duties and projects for these scientists, professors, bioethicists, and other professionals.
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The 2011 changes to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Health Service (PHS) regulations for reporting investigator conflicts of interest may still be causing confusion for researchers and IRBs.
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Protocol review consistency is a hot topic as IRBs, research organizations, and investigators struggle with balancing quality and efficiency in the review process.
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One of the strangest new areas of research ethics involves how IRBs should handle research that involves Internet communities, including virtual communities.
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Researchers go to all sorts of lengths to attract participants for surveys and other types of non-clinical research recruiting Psych 101 students, posting fliers, handing out gift cards, etc. But a new method of recruitment takes advantage of an existing Internet trend toward outsourcing tasks to thousands of computer users around the world.
