By Allison Proffitt 

 

April 9, 2014 | Though there are site comparison tools designed to help CROs and sponsors with site selection, there has been little available to sites to track their own performance and understand their strengths and weaknesses. 

 

The Research Resonance Network, grown out of a working group of sites trying to do just that, hopes to fill that gap. The effort was recognized in February at the inaugural Clinical Informatics News Best Practices Awards held at the fifth annual Summit for Clinical Ops Executives (SCOPE) in Miami, Fla.  
 

The Network was born out of a small collaboration of CTMS customers grappling with their own site metrics. 
 

For 14 years, Forte Research Systems has been providing software products to support clinical research operations. Their clinical trial management system (CTMS), OnCore Enterprise Research, has been in use at research centers including the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation and the Indiana University Simon Cancer Center. 
 

Forte calls its community of OnCore customers Onsemble, and in addition to offering software, has hosted collaboration groups for Onsemble members to discuss their own questions of interest. 

 

When some discussions among Onsemble members led to a Metrics collaboration group in 2006, even Forte didn’t expect what would result.  

 

“The collaboration group was really focused on identifying their own metrics,” explains Laura Hilty, director of product management. “It came out of an interest of the academic organizations who wanted to understand how they compared with each other, since they each had different strengths in different areas.” 
 

Survey-based tools designed for site selection were subjective, but the sites wanted more objective markers of their performance. Other site metric initiatives tend to focus on subsets of a site’s portfolio—just trials done with a particular sponsor, for example—and didn’t give sites the full picture. The sites in the Onsemble Metrics group wanted to get a full picture of their performance based on objective data, and they wanted to know how they compared with other sites and how they improved over time. 
 

The goals of the collaboration were defined by the participating organizations, and Forte worked as a facilitator. “They defined the top metrics they wanted to track and which were most valuable, along with the data definitions for each one of those,” Hilty said. 
 

While the group was actively comparing their metrics, and presenting their findings, they still wanted to dig deeper. Forte recognized a need that they could help fill. 
 

“We decided to take it to the next level and create software for it,” Hilty said. The resulting suite of tools for comparative research is the Research Resonance Network, launched last year.
 

Forte hosts the Research Resonance Network as a service to the research community. Membership in the network is free, and currently numbers 45 members, both OnCore customers and other academic sites. 
 

The tool suite helps sites gather and analyze their own metrics using operational data already tracked in their CTMS, and then anonymizes the data, so that sites can see how they compare to other sites. 
 

Members are still actively requesting new ways to view and analyze the data. “We’re talking not only about the metrics and what additional metrics are needed, but also what would be really beneficial from the technology standpoint,” Hilty said. 

Currently-measured metrics include, among others, cycle times (IRB submission to IRB approval, open to accrual to first patient in); volumetrics (active protocols, new subject accruals, initial IRB reviews); and effort metrics around budgeting, internal auditing, and protocol life stages.
 

Members use their findings to promote their competitive advantages based on real data, and to address their top areas of inefficiency. The metrics let sites benchmark their operations against their peers, provide data-driven rationale when requesting additional resources, and fill out site feasibility questionnaires based on real data. 
 

Behind the Curtain
 

Forte doesn’t charge sites for the network, instead acting as a “trusted third party, ensuring that the privacy of all participants is protected,” the awards entry stated. 
 

“From the outset of the company we wanted to change the industry—as I’m sure many organizations want to do,” Hilty said. “But we feel that change really starts with the sites and improving the sites themselves. Over the years we’ve realized that there are very few tools for the sites to really understand how they’re doing, even as a first step to improvement.” 
 

Early on, the company decided not to limit users to their own Onsemble community, but to “open it up to the rest of the world.” Though current members are all academic sites, Hilty says that the Network will be open to all sites within the first half of 2014. 
 

As the Network expands, Hilty says that Forte wants to make sure the working foundation of the group is solid and working collaboratively. Then Network members will be invited to share their best practices for improving metrics, just like the original Onsemble working group has done. 
 

However, primarily, Forte is focused on protecting members’ identities so that members can remain anonymous if they wish to—from both Forte and other members. 
 

“We’re just getting started,” Hilty said. She foresees enabling subgroups within the Network of similar sites. “There are a lot of opportunities for bringing different groups together, improving the sites themselves, and also improving the industry, making it a smaller, more collaborative, world.”