Case Study | Global Contract Research Organization (CRO) elluminate Makes Managing Multiple Data Sources Simple
Collecting clinical trial data from multiple sources is challenging, and often a labor intensive process. Today, the majority of approaches to cleaning, standardizing and publishing data remain manual. Additionally, the number of data sources continue to grow due to industry trends such as the increase in data collection common with decentralized clinical trials (DCTs) models, biomarker management and EHRs. Contract research organizations (CROs) are now challenged to deliver high quality, cost-effective studies in an increasingly complex data environment.
The Challenge
For most CROs, the Sponsor dictates which data sources to pull information from. Sponsors typically have a preferred electronic data capture (EDC) system and they have ideas of how they want the data to be gathered. This can include traditional collection by study coordinators at clinical trial sites, or data taken directly from patients via remote technology. Either way, the data needs to be verified, cleaned and formatted in a way as to be useful for researchers, currently a lengthy and burdensome process.
One leading global CRO began exploring ways to improve efficiency through a technology partner. Specifically, they hoped to simplify and accelerate the tedious processes of manual data standardization.
Top Global CRO
■ A biopharma and medical device outsourcing service company
■ 18,000+ employees
■ Operations in 50+ countries world wide
Building the Solution
The CRO selected eClinical Solutions’ elluminate Clinical Data Cloud platform to help solve these challenges and improve efficiencies. With the elluminate Data Central product, issues with inaccurate data recording or transcription mistakes could be minimized by providing direct access to the platform for both site team members and Sponsors. Data cleaning and formatting from different EDCs and other sources could be made easier via the elluminate Mapper products built-in connections with the most common data sources in the clinical research industry. The intuitive user interface would then enable data managers to easily clean data, generate queries and launch workflows all from the same platform.
Communication challenges between clinical operations and medical teams could be minimized by giving both teams access to elluminate through Data Central, facilitating the sharing of up-to-date and accurate data. This allows medical teams to conduct their reviews without the need for manual trackers and clinical operations to view prioritized queries without needing to pass Excel spreadsheets back and forth. Data Central also allowed for the visualization of data and production of ad hoc, custom graphs to help teams quickly analyze and understand the data they need.
The Results
With elluminate in place, the CRO saw immediate improvements in several areas:
■ Data managers had better access to the data from all sources
■ Data cleaning could be done with the push of a button
■ Managers could easily standardize listings and copy assets across studies, eliminating the need to redo work in many cases.
Tips for CROs managing data from multiple sources.
Contact eClinical Solutions to learn more about how elluminate makes managing multiple data sources simple.