Published January 10, 2019
Dear Colleagues,
Approximately three years ago, Siteman Cancer Center implemented the OnCore Clinical Trials Management System to streamline clinical trial operations and management. Last year, we began Phase II. This included optimization of OnCore financials to support industry-sponsor invoicing and integration with Epic to automate subject enrollment and support research billing compliance. The success of these efforts established a foundation for expanding OnCore to the greater Washington University clinical research enterprise. OnCore is an industry leading clinical trials management system that is utilized by 42 National Cancer Institute (NCI)-Designated Cancer Centers and 36 academic medical centers, including 23 Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Programs. Given that, we are excited to improve our research operations through this expansion.
Phase III: Expansion of OnCore Enterprise-wide
Project Goals
We are pleased to announce that we are beginning Phase III of this journey. Expanding OnCore to the enterprise will provide the study teams with tools to manage their day-to-day operations. It will provide a common infrastructure that will promote consistency and efficiency for managing the clinical, financial, and regulatory aspects of clinical research. Providing better tools and streamlined processes will allow study teams to focus less on administrative tasks, and more on our core mission — to advance new breakthroughs that will benefit patients.
How and When
We realize that technology alone is not the answer. Work has already begun to conduct a current state assessment and identify ways that using OnCore and refining our processes can help. This will be followed by an implementation-planning, future-state process design effort. Designated stakeholders will participate in future state workflow design sessions. The goal of these sessions is to develop processes that make the best use of the new technology. The output from this will guide policy and procedure design, and end user training. This will take place during the Q1 of 2019.
The plan is to bring groups of departments live in two or more “sprints.” We anticipate the first to go live in Q3 of 2019.
To support our efforts, we have enlisted the help of Huron Consulting Group to facilitate the development of the future state design. Forte Research (the providers of OnCore) is also engaged to support our implementation efforts.
More to Come
This introductory communication is intended to provide basic information about the project. The implementation team will be expanding communication channels to ensure we provide timely updates as the project develops and will offer several opportunities for the research community to ask questions and provide suggestions.
For general information about OnCore, contact the OnCore Support Team at oncore@wustl.edu.
Best regards,
Yi Zhang
Assistant Dean & Administrative Director
Center for Clinical Studies
Albert Lai
Chief Research Information Officer
School of Medicine