Sponsor Key Performance Indicators - Part 1

Sponsor Performance KPI - Part 1

Sponsors are the key stakeholders in clinical trials. It is important to measure the performance of sponsors to understand the trends in the industry and market. Metrics such as studies registered, studies completed, study results posted, collaboration and study completion duration can be key performance indicators from study conduct perspective. We can gain competitive intelligence about competitor sponsors or find opportunities to collaborate with potential partners. The possibilities are endless. 
Let's see who were top Industry sponsors in terms of studies completed in 2018 ranked by number of completed studies. 

There are 4,017 studies completed by industry sponsors in 2018. Novartis is leading the board with 114 studies completed in 2018, followed by GSK and Pfizer with 96 and 92 studies respectively. The chart also shows the number of results posted by those sponsors in 2018. There may be studies completed in 2018 for which the results are not posted yet, but I am not aware of any requirements for posting results. Another metric is the ration of completed studies to the studies with posted results. There should be a linear relationship since more completed studies would mean more posted results. To just verify that, let's create a scatter plot. There is a strong linear relationship. The R-square value is pretty high. See the plot below with a fitted line. It may be interesting to look at sponsors with very low ratio.
  

Now, let's take a look at what's going on with non-industry sponsors in the same year 2018.

NIH, Mayo clinic and Duke University are the top 3 performers. 

The studies completed numbers are comparable  but the posted results and the ratio is very low when compared to sponsors from industry segment. The slope is 0.13 as compared to 0.3 for industry sponsors. So, we see that industry sponsors are posting more results. 

   
We can see that the industry sponsors(blue) have higher posted results for same levels of completed studies as compared to the non-industry sponsors(red).
I am really trying to think why non-industry sponsors have low results postings than industry sponsors. 
Every study is required to submit the results, generally no later than 12 months of completion.
The clinicaltrials.gov explains what all is included in the results and also mentions few valid reasons when the results are not submitted:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/about-site/results#DisplayOfResults 

Good news!!! I have recreated sponsor analytics using flexdashboards and plotly R so that you all can interact instead of viewing static jpeg images. The charts are very interactive and you can view individual data points. However, in the analysis, I have only included sponsors that have completed at least 10 studies, to reduce the number of data points as well as the skewness caused by them since there were a large numbers of sponsors within that range. I hope you would enjoy that.
Link to Dashboard:
http://rpubs.com/kalehdoo/SponsorDashboard

Summary -There are a total of 2234 sponsors who have completed at least 10 studies in the past out of which there are 647 (29%) sponsors from Industry and the remaining 1587 (71%) from non-industry.
Non-industry sponsors are further classified into Academic and Hospital based on their names (this may not be 100% correct and you may notice some sponsors classified incorrectly).
Keep reading!!!