By Clinical Informatics News Staff 

February 26, 2015 | The winners of Clinical Informatics News’ Best Practices Awards were announced yesterday at the 2015 Summit for Clinical Ops Executives, SCOPE, in Orlando. Three grand prizes were awarded recognizing organizations’ outstanding use of information technology to improve patient services, clinical operations, and clinical trial management. Six additional companies were named finalists. 

The winners were announced during the final plenary panel at SCOPE in an awards presentation hosted by Allison Proffitt, editor of Clinical Informatics News.

In the category of “Patient Data Management,” ePharmaSolutions took home the award for their project, "SitePortal: Moving Clinical Research Study Sites and Medical Institutions to a Paperless Clinical Trials Environment." SitePortal is an ePharmaSolutions product designed to provide sites with a validated, cloud-based portal from which they can manage their clinical trial resources, maintain and archive all of their study and site-level documents online.

In the category of “Study Startup and Design,” Clinical Supplies Management (CSM) received the award for a direct-to-patient shipping project that enabled a complex pediatric clinical trial. The 36 young patients, located across the U.S., were required to take doses at three specific times each day for 14 consecutive days. The medication had to be prepared in a laboratory, shipped fresh daily, used within 48 hours, and maintained at 2 to 8°C at all times. CSM designing a patient kit that was reconstituted daily and shipped overnight, even on weekends.

In the category of “Clinical Data Intelligence,” Dabo Health was selected for their entry, "Quality Metrics: Date Transparency and User-customized Design Drive Frontline Engagement" Dabo Health launched a pilot study with the Mayo Clinic cardiovascular unit to use a social environment to foster a culture of teamwork, accountability, and improved patient care. Mayo found that the Dabo platform prompted a culture of transparency, and improved metrics and communication. “Providers began to ask to compare their performance against other units within the hospital,” the entry reported, and collaborative sharing of information and of responsibility reduced duplicated effort and other inefficiencies.

In addition to the three winners, entries from CFS Clinical, DDi, DrugDev, MakroCare, Parallax Online, and PHT Corporation were named finalists.

Judges, including industry experts and members of the Clinical Informatics News editorial staff, reviewed many deserving entries, considering factors like industry impact, innovative use of technology, and effort to tackle areas with large unmet need for new solutions. Said Proffitt, “This year’s entries represented some of the vendor tools and customer partnerships in clinical operations. The awards program once again highlighted the innovative ways that companies are addressing the pain points in clinical trials.”

Clinical Informatics News will begin accepting entries for the 2016 Best Practices Awards in August 2015. For more details contact: Allison Proffitt: aproffitt@healthtech.com, 617-233-8280.