Sean McNiff | bluebird bio

Clinical Programming

Sean McNiff, Associate Director Clinical Programming, bluebird bio

McNiff: We’ve been working with eClinical Solutions since mid-2016. We started off with a pilot where we did two studies and we did full visualizations and some services time, and we were able to explore some of the limits of the system. Right after that we started doing a tech transfer, and working on training the trainers, so that we could self-service the application ourselves. We wanted to partner with someone who would be able to understand our needs, and they were going to be able to work with us. We wanted somebody with a similar mindset to us, where it would be mutually beneficial – our success and their success would be something that we would both benefit from. With that, we were able to develop some trust, and with that trust, we can explore things that we typically wouldn’t be able to explore with your typical vendor.

One of the things we found particularly useful with elluminate is that we were able to do the end to end data feed right through the visualizations. We had this particular piece of lab data that’s difficult to review in tabular format, and we are able to format the data so that it’s able to be pushed into a labs over time graphic. When we pushed that data that had been reviewed many times in a tabular format into a graphical view, we were able to see the outlier just pop right out of the graphic.

I see, certainly within my company, the MDs want to view the data visually. They don’t want to have just a pile of patient profile listings and data dumps that they have to plow through. They want to see some specific deep dive data visualizations so they can go patient by patient and see what’s happening in multiple lab parameters, and look at some vital signs, and see patient by patient all of these things displayed just with the click of a mouse.

One way that we’re seeing ROI on the system is that we’re able to do a lot of programming inhouse. Typically you need to hire SaaS programmers to do this – most industry companies use SaaS programmers to do these activities – we’re able to internalize that and have programmers do the work and provide listings, and be nimble for our customers [when they ask] “hey this looks great, but can you make this little change?”. We’re able to go right in the system and make the change, and they are able to have their report as soon as we QC it and get it out the door. We’re seeing a lot of payoff with time saved and not having to engage with the vendor to produce listings for us, and we don’t have to go to the EDC vendor and have them generate something for us that we can do by ourselves. We’re seeing a quick turnaround, not spending a lot of money on vendors, and we can let our stats group do SaaS programming for statistical activities and not for data cleaning activities, because my department can do that.