My name is Randeep Basra and I am a Clinical Studies Officer for the Clinical Research Network in North West London. I am part of the delivery team that helps with the setup and support at primary care sites and recruitment of participants for research projects that I am assigned to work on.
One of the projects currently in progress is iHealth-T2D, a multicentre, cluster randomised clinic trial on type 2 diabetes in the South Asian population. The study looks to provide evidence that the implementation of lifestyle modifications and health promotion is clinically effective in reducing the onset of type 2 diabetes in South Asians with central obesity or pre-diabetes compared to usual care. Managing the study has brought on some complex and challenging situations in terms of project management, where communication, organisation and team work has been key to the success we have experienced so far.
This has been helped significantly by the use of EDGE. In the early stages, large amounts of information about the study was kept in a number of places that were not so easy to access and were becoming difficult to manage by the team as a whole. An example of such information was the staff involved and their contact details, information about clinics being run at GP practices and patients recruited, just to name a few. When hearing about EDGE, we felt it could work to solve these issues.
Since then, we haven’t looked back. Once the process of uploading all the information to EDGE had taken place, we found it straightforward to access and the layout easy to navigate. We are able to effortlessly store different pieces of information about the project or primary care sites in one place that everyone can see. For example, I can find a particular recruiting site in a couple of clicks and can access information on how many patients were contacted from a particular site and on what date, when screening clinics are running and how many participants have been recruited so far. The outcome is that everyone is able to look at and maintain up-to-date information about the study from a single place from almost any location at any time.
Knowing that I can add users and have the contact details of any member of staff from any of the 50+ GP practices taking part is reassuring and allows a smooth stream of communication with everyone involved. Personally, the “notes” section is a highlight for me, as being able to communicate updates about an individual site for everyone to see in a free-text box saves time on administration and permits flexibility depending on what information can be stored here. Although it is not necessary to upload patient information to EDGE for our team, I have found using anonymous codes for each patient recruited at GP practices has been a safe and fool-proof way for me to keep an accurate record of how many participants are engaged with the study. Last, but certainly not least, the “project attribute reports” have been wonderful when requiring a snapshot of the study for team meetings and to assess data quality.
This hasn’t just been useful for me the delivery team – other staff who support the delivery team have found it a great way to pull off information from the system when it comes to arranging financial payments or tracking recruitment. In fact, this study was the first we have tried to store financial information on and while this is work in progress, it has been very useful so far. In this way, the whole team can be singing from the same hymn sheet without the need for endless spreadsheets and hard-to-follow email trails.
We would like to give a special thanks to Kaatje and Sean for all the support we have had in making this system work well for the project. We feel the adaptability and brains of the system, as well as the people behind it, are what make it work for us.
Here is a shot of the team who have all been involved in delivering the study.
Post by Randeep Basra, Clinical Studies Officer
CRN North West London
randeep.basra@nihr.ac.uk