David Evans | Assoc. Director, Data Management

We went through a vendor selection process with a few vendors – eClinical’s elluminate stood out as really fitting our needs, which was focused on centralized issue management. We were looking for a centralized issue management system. In fact, that’s what we call it. That was the name that we started with. What can we do to move away from Excel for tracking critical data issues?

There’s better options out there than Excel. We’re growing company – I think we can do better. And so, we’re really pleased with what we’ve got with elluminate. The implementation process was really smooth, really quick. We were able to get three studies live in roughly six months. We picked those studies because they were good candidates. Two of them were just starting up, so there was nothing in place as far as listings – exception listings.

So we were able to get them all on elluminate and make them available to end users for review and for issue creations. The feedback’s been really positive from the end users about the convenience of the platform and about creating those issues. They find it very easy to use. It’s actually making their review easier. It’s making it easier to collaborate.

Actually, I had a medical monitor say, I’m really happy that I can see what my pharmacovigilance colleague is doing. So, safety and medical monitor, they’re both saying that they like the platform because it can collaborate and see what’s happening really easily and avoid an email or a call, you know, asking, Hey, have you had a chance to look at this safety event?

They can see right there that they’re on it. They’ve raised an issue or they’ve done their review. So that’s that’s value for those two groups to be able to just kind of seamlessly collaborate. That’s a big value right there. And they find it user friendly and they’re happy that, hey, this is a platform that’s actually better than Excel.

They see the value as opposed to the old process, the legacy process of let me go review something in Excel, and then if I find an issue, I have to go to a different Excel manually, enter that all the manual entry is replaced by something that they just see right away. It’s a better process.

I feel like we’ve just taken a small bite and there’s a lot out there that we’re not currently doing. But, you know, you want to start out with a small bite, which is appropriate when you think of change management. I don’t want to throw a bunch of stuff at a bunch of people that they’re not ready for.

So, our piece that we that we’re tackling is starting with issue management, and that’s going really well. And I’m learning a lot about what is coming both in Data Central and other things like the machine learning, you know, critical data points that can be presented to you – anomalies. You know, there’s a lot going on in this platform. It’s continually being enhanced. So, we’re looking forward to what the future is bringing.