BEFORE
Velocity Clinical Research Before RealTime
- Disparate systems at each site
- No trial oversight by central teams
- Lacking metrics for performance
AFTER
Velocity Clinical Research After RealTime
- Centralized platform for business intelligence
- Trial transparency in real time
- Robust reporting and dashboards
Overview
Velocity Clinical Research, headquartered in Durham, NC, is a wholly owned research site organization focused on patient engagement, quality, scalability and therapeutic breadth. Founded in 2017, Velocity now comprises 90 research sites, geographically dispersed across the United States. Collectively, Velocity’s sites have been focusing on clinical study trials for over 250 years with more than 15,000 successfully completed studies.
The Velocity model represents a new approach to site management. By owning and operating all sites directly, the organization offers consistent and highly efficient patient recruitment, engagement, and integrated study processes and systems.
The Challenge
Craig Koch joined Velocity Clinical Research early in 2019 as the Vice President of Business Development. Velocity’s goal is to become fully integrated across all of their acquired sites including the complete adoption of organization-wide technology platforms and processes. Craig implemented the RealTime-Devana, previously PROPEL, software starting in March 2019 to centralize and automate workflows across the business development, feasibility, and all study start-up functions. Most importantly, Devana allowed Velocity’s central team to benefit from reports and dashboards capable of analyzing trial performance aggregated across Velocity’s entire network of acquired sites or review isolated performance at the individual trial or individual site level.
With the central team successfully unified on Devana and Velocity having grown to 16 sites across the U.S. through acquisition, the next logical step to further integrate Velocity was to connect the central team to the more decentralized site staff. For example, clinical and investigative staff might only require involvement at very specific milestones during study start-up such as input into feasibility survey requests or patient recruitment goals when a trial opens to enrollment.
Like many large research organizations, communication during start-up and enrollment at Velocity was taking place across multiple mediums including emails, phone calls, meetings ,and informal “water cooler” conversations which wasted time and could breed confusion, ultimately causing delays.
The Solution
Devana provided Velocity Clinical Research with one common platform to be the source-of-truth to unify and enable their central team and all sites and staff across their vast network to clearly communicate. Every Velocity team member had complete transparency into the clinical trial pipeline being managed by Craig Koch’s central Business Development Team. Communication from the central team to each Site Director regarding new study announcements and patient enrollment goals and performance expectations – both across the Velocity organization and at each individual site and study team – are now clear and transparent fostering individual buy-in and accountability for results.
Specifically, Velocity now has a suite of reports within Devana targeted for each site and providing Site Directors visibility into everything from outstanding tasks, the status of studies in their pipeline, study performance, enrollment goals across all studies, and real-time data to forecast and plan workload and allocate resources and make expenditures to help meet those goals within the enrollment timeline. With Devana, Individual Site Directors now have the tools to operate their sites like entrepreneurial business centers within the larger Velocity Clinical Research organization.
“Devana is the backbone of Velocity Clinical Research’s operating infrastructure. The Devana system not only lets me track my team’s productivity but allows us to evaluate trial opportunities with two-way, real-time communication between our central HQ team and our sites directly without ever having to leave the system! In a world where distraction is everywhere, we needed a system that contained everything in one place. Devana is that system for us.”
Craig Koch, Vice President of Business Development
Velocity Clinical Research
The Results
From a tangible time saving standpoint, all internal communication across Velocity Clinical Research’s rapidly growing network of research sites now takes place within the Devana system, eliminating the flood of emails, calls, meetings, and follow-up. Devana serves as a central repository for all communication, allowing Velocity’s central team to push out updates to sites, and gives sites the ability to request information from the central team within the platform eliminating the need for duplicate emails, phone calls, and meetings. This common platform for all study collaboration has translated into 2 hours of time savings each week for at least 20 central and study team members, or a savings value of over $100,000 in staff costs that can now be re-allocated to more productive tasks and projects.
Site Directors have been the biggest champions of Devana. Initially, Velocity deployed Devana only at the Site Director level, but after realizing all that could be accomplished by providing additional study team staff with user-access to the Velocity Site Portal, there was overwhelming demand for new user additions. Velocity originally onboarded 10 site users, and within the first quarter, portal site users more than doubled. “Even at our smaller sites where PIs are much more involved in the day-to-day, once the Site Directors showed them Devana’s capabilities, even the PIs requested access,” said Craig. Advocacy for the Devana platform has been well-supported by Velocity’s Executive Suite. According to Craig, “We achieved adoption from more people on the executive side than we thought would be possible because there is just so much more data.”
As Craig aptly summarized, “It’s one of those things like when you upgrade stuff at home, all-of-a-sudden you can’t imagine how you even functioned before! Now that the Site Directors and Study Teams at the sites have access to this data, they wouldn’t know how to function without it – that is where we are at with Devana. Devana is the platform that turned us from a network of sites to one cohesive research organization.”
- Key Takeaways
With RealTime-Devana, Velocity has transformed how they manage the business of clinical trials. Other benefits include:
- Centralized communications and trial management
- Common platform for central and site-based teams
- Exponential growth and scalability become a reality
- Single source of truth
- Robust performance metrics and reporting
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