Case Study: Implementing EDGE Finance to Streamline Pharmacy Cost Recovery and Drive Capacity Growth
The Challenge
Prior to accelerating our use of EDGE, our clinical trials pharmacy service was heavily reliant on manual, paper-based processes and disconnected spreadsheets. London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust has experienced significant growth, alongside our designation as a Commercial Research Delivery Centre. As our portfolio grew, our legacy infrastructure struggled to keep pace, which created significant administrative bottlenecks for our team.
User Profile
Name: Shyam Thakrar
Job Title: Senior Specialist Pharmacist, Clinical Trials
Organisation: London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust
EDGE user since: 2022
Historically, quarterly costing was an incredibly time-consuming and retrospective process. It required staff to manually go back through individual trial folders, identify dispensing activities, shipments, and reimbursements, and record them across multiple spreadsheets before sending them over to the finance team. This duplicate effort increased the risk of missed costs and human error, and meant that finance lacked a real-time, single source of truth. With contract amendments requiring entirely new spreadsheets to be generated, maintaining an accurate financial audit trail became increasingly difficult.
The Solution
Recognising that our systems needed to grow alongside our expanding portfolio, we looked at how we could better utilise technology to build a more sustainable, digital, and efficient service. Our Trust’s initial adoption of EDGE had started slowly, but I saw the immense potential of the platform's finance functionality to solve our local operational challenges and eliminate spreadsheet duplication.
Rather than attempting a massive, immediate rollout across multiple departments, we focused on demonstrating the immediate practical value of the system. Pharmacy partnered directly with our finance manager to implement EDGE Finance within our own service first. We were able to prove how the system could centralise information, improve cost recovery, and provide finance with a direct window into our activity without overwhelming the wider organisation.
The Process
Our implementation strategy over the past 12 to 18 months heavily relied on effective change management. Our clinical trials pharmacy staff were already exceptionally busy, and so introducing a new digital process initially felt like adding an extra administrative burden rather than removing one. Showing rather than simply telling people that the system worked became our primary tool for overcoming resistance and driving engagement.
We focused on building a fully integrated workflow where contract amendments, activity recording, and cost reviews could all occur within the same ecosystem. When study costs changed, we transitioned from creating entirely new spreadsheets to uploading an updated interactive Costing Template (iCT) directly into EDGE, preserving previous versions as a clean audit trail. By directly involving our finance manager in this pharmacy-first rollout, we aligned the system with existing financial expectations, smoothing out operational friction and building the clinical team's confidence step by step.
The Results
Fully embedding EDGE Finance has fundamentally modernised how we track clinical trial activity and recover costs. We have successfully moved away from retrospective, quarterly exercises to capturing dispensing costs and sponsor reimbursements closer to when they actually occur. This proactive tracking has drastically reduced data duplication, lowered the risk of missed costs, and provided our finance team with highly accurate and timely information throughout the year.
Beyond day-to-day invoicing, the availability of real-time recruitment figures and study income has allowed us to accurately forecast potential revenue, providing robust, objective evidence for internal business cases. Crucially, by reducing the time our specialist pharmacy staff spend on administrative tasks and spreadsheet maintenance, we have successfully redirected our capacity toward the clinical management of increasingly complex medicinal products. This shift ensures higher patient safety, allows us to safely host more complex studies, and expands our overall research capacity to give more patients access to innovative treatment options.
What’s Next?
Our immediate focus over the next 6 to 12 months is leveraging this high-quality data to eliminate remaining manual bottlenecks. We are exploring how to capture broader operational data within our daily workflows to understand real-time workload, capacity, and service pressures. I am also working closely with Stevie Barre and the EDGE team to explore automated forecasting features. We aim to automatically predict trial income and track drug cost avoidance by combining iCT data with recruitment targets, thus capturing the wider NHS savings generated when medicines are funded by sponsors rather than routine NHS budgets.
Ultimately, our long-term ambition is to transition entirely away from manual data assembly and toward a fully digital, sustainable clinical trials service. By using EDGE to generate real-time, meaningful intelligence, we will continue to make evidence-based decisions that demonstrate the true value of pharmacy research and support the Trust's broader Green Plan.
“Fully embedding EDGE Finance has fundamentally modernised how we track clinical trial activity and recover costs. We have successfully moved away from retrospective, quarterly exercises to capturing dispensing costs and sponsor reimbursements closer to when they actually occur. ”