Safety Analytics – What does Oracle Argus Analytics bring to the table?

Many large Drug Safety organizations have initiatives to leverage the historical data available to them and measure the operational inefficiencies of their processes. In my opinion these initiatives are worth spending your dollar. With the increased scrutiny by regulators on patient safety, drastic increase of data sources and dwindling budgets, the more you know about how good or bad you are at managing your processes to handle safety cases is worth the investment.The challenge always is with deciding what do you want to measure beyond your typical KPIs that you’d get from standard reports made available by the drug safety system vendors. Also, how flexible is the tool in making it easy for your team to define additional KPIs, create dashboards/reports and combine historical data with current data to perform comparative analysis.

Oracle has quickly established themselves as a leader in the Drug Safety space through acquisition of Relsys and Phaseforward. They probably have 3x the customers compared to their nearest competitor for all of their three safety systems. While this creates confusion in the short term, Argus Safety is emerging as the strategic product that they would support and continue enhancements in the long run. One of the initiatives that has come to fruition around this tool is Argus Analytics (formerly Oracle Pharmacovigilance Analytics ot OPVA) which has been available as a general release for close to 2 years now. While it demands additional investment from sponsors, I think it is a good starting point for any sponsor or CRO trying to measure their operational efficiency, identify bottlenecks and improve their decision making process.

I will keep this post brief and not go into the details of each KPI/Dashboard that is available in Oracle Argus Analytics and give a list of dashboards available. Many of these are self explanatory. More information can be found in the user guide available online here: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E35225_01/doc.11/e29106/toc.htm

Dashboard	Type	Filter	Pages (Tabs)
Case Processing History	Trailing	Enterprise ID	Case Processing Volume History
			Case Processing Compliance History
			Workflow State Repetition History
Case Processing Management	Current	Enterprise ID	Case Processing Volume Management
			Case Processing Compliance Management
			Workflow State Compliance Management
Personal User Dashboard	Trailing & Current	Enterprise ID	Personal User Case History
			Personal User Case Management
			Personal User Case Work History
			Personal User Expedited Report History
			Personal User Expedited Report Management
Expedited Report History			Expedited Submission Volume History
			Expedited Non-Submission Volume History
			Expedited Submission Compliance History
Expedited Report Management			Expedited Submission Volume Management
			Expedited Submission Compliance Management
			Expedited Failed/Pending ACK Volume Management
Case Work History			Case Modified History
			Case Unmodified History
			Case Read History
			Case Idle History

Hope this gives a high level idea about the various dashboards available in Argus Analytics.

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 5,600 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 9 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Selecting a partner to provide hosted Drug Safety Solution

Over the last 3 years, I have come across several initiatives from life sciences companies to revisit their Drug Safety system strategy, in line with the trend of evaluating their options with other IT systems, on whether they should continue to host and support these systems on-premise or move to cloud. We all have witnessed a major shift towards Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, Drug Safety is no exception. The challenge with this strategy is that it needs a dramatic shift in the traditional thinking that prevails in the industry in terms of people, process and technology. What I mean by that is:

1. People should understand that once the system is hosted by an external partner, the way the business and IT teams within the sponsor organization interact with the support teams will change dramatically. For example, they may not be able to pick up the phone and call a Mr. John Doe at the last minute to get their product/license configured in the safety system to support the launch of a new study.
2. Processes, both business and support, should be changed to reflect the new model and ensure seamless transition and steady state support to ensure the business operations are not impacted.  For example, if you are engaging a new partner in a new market to support your clinical study you have to engage the service provider so you plan and support the onboarding process in time.
3. Technology should be brought in to accommodate such change and ensure business continuity, system performance and transparency in service delivery. For example, tools should be made available to not only monitor the performance of the system and process but also to continually review and improve the performance.

You may argue that these are required for any transition from “On-Premise” model to “SaaS/Hosted” model. My answer would be YES, but the regulated clinical research world adds additional emphasis on getting it right the first time and ensuring that every aspect is validated and in compliance with the regulatory requirements of various agencies across the sponsors markets. I want to list some key items that would be useful to sponsors, in evaluating Drug Safety System hosting partners.

• Domain Expertise: The first and foremost criterion is “how much does the partner know about Drug Safety?” You cannot go to run-of-the-mill hosting partner and expect them to understand your business processes and host the system in compliance with the regulatory requirements
• Hosting Expertise: Have they hosted a safety system for any other customers? If not, have they hosted a system that requires validation and should comply with regulatory requirements? Will it be a “Multi-tenant” environment? If so, do they have experience facing audit for such a setup as my data may be hosted along with my competitors? How do they ensure Data Privacy and Security? Does their system support Single Sign On (SSO) or do my users need a separate login to access the system, which could be disruptive to business
• Hosting Location: Where are they hosting my data? Some countries do not allow safety data of patients to reside on foreign soil for obvious reasons.  What arrangements do they have from a Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity perspective?  How do they staff in case disaster strikes the main site? Do they move people or do they maintain minimal staff to support the secondary site?
• A-Team: Do they have the right people? If so, what are their qualifications? In my experience many sponsors look for references of the partner. That may not always be the right way to evaluate the partner because the staff that delivered the project for that referenced customer may not be with the organization anymore. Most service providers in drug safety space have small teams. Not all of them have bench strength to fully staff the engagement. However, it is critical that they have senior staff to seed the team and bring on additional staff as needed
• Processes: Do they have SOPs and WIs to get the new environment up and running faster but with little risk? Can they also provide case processing and aggregate reporting services? If so, what processes do they have in place? Do those processes meet our requirements? If not, how do we harmonize the processes?
• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): It is essential that a decision of this criticality is financially viable too. Also, it is required to have a long term view of the cost associated with such a move. It is highly impractical to change your decision in short intervals of 1 to 2 years. You should be committed to a term of 3 to 5 years. If you are, then what is the total cost of ownership for such a commitment? Is the vendor transparent about all the hidden costs? If there would be increase in pricing, how predictable is it? Can we lock-in to a price now for 5 years? What discounts are offered? Can we tie in the payments to service performance? How about service credits?
• Viability: It is critical that the partner has a viable business model. Not just to fulfill your current needs, but your future needs as well. If you expand to new markets, would the partner have ability to support such a change? Do they have teams spread across multiple geographies?
• Cultural Fitment:  You need a partner that fits, not just from a strategic and operational perspective but also from a cultural perspective. This arrangement is long term and both parties should look at it as a win-win proposition and should be committed to make it a success.
• Executive Commitment: Last but not least is the commitment the partner has to this business and more importantly to your service. What is their governance model? How does the escalation process work?  Where is the executive team located? Are they a phone call away, if disaster strikes?

These are some of the aspects that I thought would be useful for some sponsors and vendors alike, to consider when selecting a partner for a drug safety hosted service. As always, appreciate your feedback and comments.

Leveraging Technology to Improve Patient Recruitment for Clinical Trials

I was asked to respond to a costumer inquiry recently to help them with providing a solution to improve their patient recruitment in clinical trials. Initially, I thought this must be a question to one of our experts in our CRO. However, I kept thinking about it and realized there isn’t a silver bullet that would solve this problem. There is no commercial off-the-shelf solution to fix this problem. Sponsors, CROs, Site Coordinators, PIs and other stakeholders involved in the clinical research have been struggling to address this situation but it is still a challenge and is the root cause of delays in clinical trials which will result in increased and lower Returns on Investment (ROI).

Discovery and development of medical products take a long time and consume lot of resources (Effort & Cost) from sponsors from molecule to patient. This involves discovery of the molecule to pre-clinical and clinical development to marketing & sales. A lot of these resources are typically spent in late stage (Phase III) of clinical trials. One of the root causes for delays in clinical trials in phase III is delay in recruiting the patients that meet the inclusion criteria of the protocol. Another key concern is patient drop out during the course of the trial. These issues not only delay the trial but also force the sponsors and CROs to consider changes to the protocol or force them to take alternative steps to ensure the necessary patient population is recruited to continue the trial.

Adherence rates across the duration of therapy

According to a report on Patient Adherence by Capgemini consulting [1], “Patient adherence levels vary between 50% for depression to 63% for enlarged prostate. On average, adherence levels drop over the course of the patient journey from 69% of patients filling their first prescription to 43% continuing their treatment as prescribed after 6 months.”

Also, if you notice in the attached diagram, 31% of the patients recruited will not last until they fill their prescription. Further, by the sixth month almost 57% patients do not show up for their refills. At this rate, in order to continue the trial, the sponsor has to continue to recruit patients during the course of the trial. This recruitment due to a drop out comes at a cost. The report has also identified that the cost of recruiting a new patient is 6 times the cost spent by sponsors to retain an existing patient.

So, what are the sponsors/CROs doing to improve the patient recruitment and reduce the drop outs? The key to fixing any problem is identifying the root cause. For this problem, there are multiple areas of failure and hence requires a comprehensive, multi-pronged strategy to fix the problems.  Some of the best practices being adopted by sponsors and/or CROs include:

• Comprehensive and incremental approach to integrated solutions rather than silos  by leveraging :

-          Patient registries

-          Better communication between patients and clinicians

-          Electronic records

-          Better engagement of physicians

• Refine Site selection

-          Analysis to select better performing sites

• Patient centric recruitment process

-          Simplify informed consent process (move to informed choice)

• Collaborative approach to Protocol design

-          Engaging Principal Investigators (PIs) in protocol design by research coordinators

• Improve patient retention

-          Better follow-up systems to increase adherence

-          Enhanced post-trial engagement

In order to implement these best practices sponsors can adopt technology solutions like:

1. Create strategy to improve the recruitment process by leveraging technology solutions
2. Analyze site performance and select high performing sites and drop out non-performing sites
3. Patient Recruitment Systems to search and match protocol eligibility criteria with patient’s available Electronic Health Records (EMRs, Narratives, Health Insurance and Claims Documents)
4. Social Media tools to target patient communities to identify potential subjects from the available patient population
5. Social Media tools to gauge trial buzz in patient and physician community
6. Study & Investigator Portals to enhance engagement and collaboration between study coordinators and Principal Investigators
7. Mobile Trial Adherence Systems to alert and notify patients of visits and other trial compliance activities to reduce drop outs
8. Key Opinion Leader portals to better engage physicians
9. Analytics to identify potential subjects, site initiation process and performance, patient recruitment effectiveness, patient drop out alerts etc.
10. Advanced analytics to simulate recruitment performance based on historical data and thus tailoring recruitment strategy based on sites and other factors

Despite all these best practices and solutions, will be able to help the sponsors and CROs in:

• Collecting historical and real time operational and scientific data
• Performing objective analysis of data
• Visualization of such performance
• Identifying the bottlenecks and root causes for the problems
• Helping in making decisions to select the right sites, recruit the right patients, avoid costly drop outs and improve the collaboration and communication among Patients, Primary Investigators and other stakeholders.

I will be writing about each solution in my “Top 10” list above. As I mentioned in the beginning of this post, there is no silver bullet for this problem. A strategic and integrated approach to create solutions that will aid in collecting, analyzing and decision making is the only way to solve this problem.

As always, please let me know your feedback. If you have more insights into the problem or solutions, I will be more than glad to discuss with you and also post some of the inferences in a subsequent post, as promised. Happy Reading!!!

References:

1. “Patient Adherence: The Next Frontier in Patient Care – Vision & Reality, 9th Edition Global Research Report”  by Capgemini Consulting

Mobility – HTML 5 vs. Native Apps

Building native applications for mobile devices is like building a ‘Client-Server’ application which was popularized in the 90′s and 00′s with the explosion of personal computers. While this trend leveraged the fact that an application can use the computing power of the client device and provide better user experience and performance. However, from a maintenance perspective this was a nightmare. I still remember the “DLL Compatibility” issues driving me and my team crazy when we were deploying these applications in an enterprise environment and having to update/upgrade the application frequently. It generated a lot of call volume to the support teams. Combine that with the lack of good collaboration tools and you have a perfect storm whenever there is a new release.

The reason I bring this up is that the web has changed this whole ‘Client-Server’ paradigm and drove the application development model to adopt web-based architectures. With respect to Mobile Application Development we are looking at another such paradigm shift where there should be more and more applications built using ‘HTML5′ based app development for mobile devices. Just as in the case of Client-Server apps, ‘Native Apps’ for mobile devices provide a lot of power for developers to build apps that provide better user experience and performance, but it is a maintenance nightmare and also tend to increase the deployment cycles. A ‘HTML5′ application that follows the “80-20″ rule and uses 20% native code will provide greater flexibility by delivering almost all the advantages that a ‘Native App’ would. Plus, it also fits into the “Build Once Deploy Anywhere” model where the app can be deployed to multiple mobile devices (iOS, Andriod, Blackberry, Windows Mobile etc.) with minimal changes (to the 20%) of the native code (all the HTML5 code doesn’t need any platform specific changes).

This approach is being recommended by many analysts, thought leaders and vendors. It would be interesting to see how many developers adopt this approach and accelerate the shift in Mobile Application Development paradigm.