Newcastle University Case Study | Defining the best fit Electronic Data Capture solution for Academia

Introduction

Newcastle University is a UK public research university. With campuses in Newcastle, London, Singapore and Malaysia, Newcastle University has a global reach.

The Newcastle Cancer Centre Pharmacology Group (NCCPG) at the Newcastle University Centre for Cancer are involved in the design and development of high-quality clinical trials and clinical studies. These studies investigate the efficacy, effectiveness, and efficiency of therapeutic, complex, and service-level interventions.

Arithmos is a technology and business services provider offering innovative solutions to organisations in the field of Life Sciences. Arithmos helps Clients optimise and improve their processes easily with tailor-designed solutions. For that specific case, Newcastle University engaged with Arithmos to accelerate the overall data collection and data management processes.

Background and challenges

NCCPG has the vision to facilitate world-class clinical trials that impact understanding of human disease and lead to improved diagnostics and therapeutics for patient benefit. NCCPG work in partnership with investigators across all disease types, phases of research and methodologies to run comprehensive research activities.

The goal of NCCPG was to begin the process of moving away from paper CRFs and develop an Electronic Data Capture (EDC) and document repository system. They were looking for a solution providing them with the potential to keep the independence of studies configuration, moreover, entailing a low cost of maintenance.

Analysis work of Arithmos for NCCPG was pointing a secure, flexible, and configurable Electronic Data Capture (EDC) solution as needed to meet NCCPG’s vision and expectations. Symphony EDC was the perfect match to meet Newcastle University’s expectations.

Symphony was created to provide a unique customer experience as a user-friendly tool with which users can collect, manage and report their data from clinical trials autonomously.

It is a validated web-based Electronic Data Capture (EDC) system used by numerous pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device, universities and non-profit organisations.

With the successful implementation of the solution provided by Arithmos, Newcastle University has been a Symphony EDC Client since 2013.

Arithmos’ Approach

According to the Newcastle University needs and priorities, we have offered a tailored solution:

• Symphony EDC platform was provided in the SaaS model.
  
  
• Administrator training was provided to enable the necessary skills to the Clinical Study Team to build studies autonomously including the programming of edit checks.
  The training lasted 3 days and it allowed the Team to learn how to configure Symphony independently even without technical knowledge.
  
  
• With our “training on the job” approach, the Client learnt how to manage the application optimising costs and generating efficiencies. Based on the clinical process of NCCPG, we focused the training on the following key features:
  
  • Global Library Forms: during the training, we showed how to create global library forms for the first study and how to use them to save set-up time for upcoming projects and future studies.
    
  • Document Sharing & Management: Symphony EDC offers a “public trial space” where the study team can share documents related to the trial for authorised users. We showed Newcastle University Team how to benefit from this key feature.