Information Week Ranks UAMS for Technology Use

By Jon Parham

David Miller, UAMS chief information officer, (second from right) joins members of the IT team who worked on the clinical trial management program, (from left) Jiang Bian, Ph.D., Cheryl Lane and Umit Topaloglu, Ph.D.

Oct. 18, 2011 | Development of a new Web-based clinical trial management system garnered recognition for the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) as one of the nation’s most innovative users of technology, according to the annual ranking by business technology magazine Information Week.

UAMS was ranked No. 102 in the recently revealed 2011 InformationWeek 500 list, ranking ahead of companies like telecommunications giant Sprint Nextel (No. 105), health care company Merck & Co. (No. 111) and Johns Hopkins Medical (No. 117).

UAMS Information Technology collaborated with both physicians and researchers while developing the clinical trial management system. The system covers study planning, budget creation, submission, review, approval and tracking of human subject research.

“Clinical trials pave the way for new medical treatments and our researchers needed tools that allow a streamlined approach for clinical trial management,” said David Miller, vice chancellor and chief information officer. “Due to the complexity of the clinical trials submission and approval process, the regulatory requirements and other financial issues, tracking clinical research activities and billing is a tremendous challenge.”

Miller said development of the system improved workflow of trial submission and approval, eliminated the need to manually create the patient study calendar and solved research account billing.

“This project and the Information Week recognition of our team’s efforts represent not only the intellectual capital that we can create but also the innovative ‘out-of-the-box’ approaches to problem solving that are in great demand in the health care industry,” Miller said.

Key features of the system include an intuitive step-by-step form entry process that guides the researchers through the submission. It also has an easy-to-use study budget development toolkit that helps researchers plan for research patient care throughout the entire clinical trial event. The toolkit promotes accurate billing, a comprehensive review, and an approval workflow system where multiple oversight committees can virtually sit together and resolve research concerns prior to study approval. The system interfaces with, then works with, research patient scheduling, research visit activity and research billing systems.

Cheryl Lane, assistant vice chancellor in Information Technology for academic, research and enterprise systems, said a key to the initiative’s success was a collaborative relationship with clinical research leaders, including Laura Hutchins, M.D., director of clinical research for the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute. “Clinical research physicians and nurses, research compliance and billing and human research oversight leaders teamed up with IT to define the scope of a new project: Create a more efficient way to plan, conduct and bill clinical trials,” Lane said.

Other UAMS IT accomplishments in the past year included continued improvements to its electronic medical records systems.

“Our information technology goal is to equip our physicians and nurses with the tools for real-time, decision-making support in a way that enhances the care they deliver to patients,” Miller said.

UAMS is completing upgrades of its inpatient and outpatient electronic medical records to meet quality and efficiency standards set in the 2009 federal stimulus act. The records allow electronic prescribing and ordering, automatic notifications for patient drug allergies or interaction warnings, and easy record access by caregivers in any unit of the hospital.

Under the new standards, hospitals must demonstrate “meaningful use” of records systems that show efficiency and quality patient care.

UAMS also is working toward an enterprise data warehouse where its scientists will have access to HIPAA compliant clinical data from electronic medical records for use in their work. A key initiative of the UAMS Translational Research Institute, the data warehouse will provide another tool for researchers striving to turn basic science discoveries into new medical treatments.