Oracle announced its Health Sciences goBalto Activate cloud service, which is designed to help accelerate clinical trials, would now offer integration with Quorum’s institutional review board (IRB) solution.

The integrated connection enables Quorum to push approval documents directly into Activate workflows, automatically triggering alerts and helping save time.

WHY IT MATTERS

Oracle’s goBalto service streamlines and automates the selection and set up of the best performing clinical research sites to conduct trials — as a complex multi-step process, clinical trials are renowned for bottlenecks.

Quorum Review IRB is designed to help clients accelerate research through faster study start-up, reduced fulfillment time, and complimentary study support services.

The integration allows country-specific workflows and a management-based approach to site activation in goBalto Activate to communicate seamlessly with Quorum, eliminating the need to send IRB submission documents via manual forms of communication.

Study startup workflow-based solutions like these are designed to facilitate quality efforts by integrating data flow across multiple eClinical solutions, including electronic data capture, electronic trial master file (eTMF), and the clinical trial management system.

Quorum also offers harmonized IRB and Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) review, application programing interface (API) integrations, and consulting services from Kinetiq, the life sciences and clinical research consulting division of the company.

Kinetiq offers a global network of independent consultants, specializing in areas including IBCs and biologic IND applications, mobile health and research application development as well as international accreditation.

THE BIGGER TREND

A February 2017 report from the Congressional Research Service found principal investigators spend nearly half (42 percent) of their time dealing with “administrative burdens.”

Furthermore, a 2015 report by Vanderbilt University estimated the cost of compliance with federal research regulations across 13 U.S. universities and colleges at between 11 percent and 25 percent of each institution’s research expenditures.

A major goal of the 21st Century Cures Act is to implement a number of “measures to reduce administrative burdens” on researchers.

ON THE RECORD

“Automation has become critical for reducing the costs and complexities of clinical trials and this new level of integration eliminates time consuming processes and improves operational efficiencies by addressing an entrenched bottleneck in the initiation process,” Oracle Health Sciences general manager Steve Rosenberg said in a statement.

WHAT ELSE TO KNOW

Bought by Oracle last year, goBalto had activated trials at more than 90,000 sites across more than 2,000 studies in more than 80 countries, claiming it delivered savings to pharmaceutical and clinical research organizations (CROs) with over 30% reduction in study startup cycle times

At HIMSS19 last week, Oracle introduced Connected Care, a telehealth and remote patient monitoring tool initially aimed at improving stroke outcomes. 

Nathan Eddy is a healthcare and technology freelancer based in Berlin. 

Email the writer: nathaneddy@gmail.com

Twitter: @dropdeaded209