After proving the success of their electronic Institutional Review Board (eIRB) management system integration interface, Forte Research Systems, Inc. is making their Software Developers' Toolkit (SDK) freely available to all interested parties. The integrations were accomplished between Forte Research's market-leading product, the OnCore Clinical Research Management system, and various eIRB systems.
"As the market leader, we feel this was the right thing to do for our customers, not to mention the clinical research community as a whole," said Srini Kalluri, Founder, President, CEO and Chief Customer Experience Officer at Forte Research Systems. "There's no reason for every one of our customers to have to reinvent the wheel when they want to share data between their eIRB system and OnCore."
The organizations that have implemented the OnCore SDK to exchange data with their eIRB systems cite similar motivations for pursuing this method for systems integration. Goals include reducing the amount of manual data entry, reducing errors by creating a single point of data entry, improving efficiency, supporting more streamlined processes, and increasing the availability of information to the people who need it. Additionally, the SDK model allows data to be inserted into the OnCore database as easily as it may be extracted.
Two NCI-designated Cancer Centers have completed their integration between OnCore and their eIRB systems using the SDK. At the Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) in Salt Lake City, Utah, the integration was with their implementation of Click Commerce's eResearch Portal. The other completed implementation is at the University of Virginia Cancer Center, which integrated OnCore with their homegrown eIRB system.
Reducing duplicative data entry and making processes more efficient were the primary goals for the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, as well. Their ongoing implementation of the OnCore SDK is focused on cross-populating data between OnCore and a homegrown eIRB system. This information is related to Scientific Review Committee and IRB activities. In addition to review data, information related to protocol staff, protocol sponsors, and general protocol information is an ultimate goal of this data exchange.
"When we get that data to cross-populate between the two systems and we can activate studies more efficiently, that will be a great outcome," said Mary O'Dwyer, Clinical Protocol Office Associate Director at Lineberger.
Currently, there are several vendors in the marketplace who are successfully addressing the needs of IRBs with computerized systems. The OnCore SDK is general purpose and works with any commercial or homegrown system.
"The SDK model for integration has several advantages over a single-purpose interface," said Tony O'Hare, PhD, Co-founder, Vice President of Engineering, and Chief Collaboration Officer at Forte Research Systems. "Perhaps the most important benefit is that the result is available to every OnCore customer regardless of which eIRB system is in place at their institution."
Like all of Forte Research's major development initiatives, the new SDK was developed as part of a collaborative project in which members of the OnCore community worked closely with the company and provided operational expertise throughout the development process.
The "build-it-once" development model that Forte Research implemented for this SDK is the same model the company has taken from the beginning when first developing the OnCore system 11 years ago.
"What we did for CTMS, we are bringing to clinical research systems integration. Our goal is to minimize the cost of services for our customers and eliminate the need for everyone to have to pay over and over again for the same set of tools," Kalluri said.
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