The university of auckland
New Zealand has a small, spread out population of approximately 5 million, most living on the North Island of the country. It has a public health system that is organized into district health boards (DHBs) and within these DHBs, there are approximately 40 public hospitals, a proportion of which are research active, including Auckland DHB (ADHB), which serves the biggest NZ city. There are a number of universities and institutions across New Zealand that perform clinical research, the University of Auckland (UoA) being one of these.
Clinical research in NZ originates both from within the country and from strong collaborations with international academic institutions and industry. The main collaborators with NZ are the US, UK, Canada, Australia and Germany. Clinical research in the University ranges from groups and individuals that conduct multicentre national and international studies to those that conduct research at a single site and that site is the University. Cancer and Blood clinical trials centre at ADHB were very much in need of a management system as their portfolio was growing quickly with the recent opening of their Phase I unit.
The EDGE journey for NZ began in 2017 with a visit from James Batchelor, Director of the EDGE programme and impromptu discussions about clinical trial infrastructure at UoA and further afield followed. Later in 2017 and again in 2018 James and Richard Munday (EDGE Business Manager) came to NZ to discuss the use of EDGE at UoA and ADHB with a variety of potential users. For UoA, this coincided with an evaluation of clinical research IT systems to fulfil increasing requirements. The University did not have a centralised clinical research management system, not only for day-to-day use by those managing trials and studies but also for providing comprehensive oversight of activity at the institution level.
Interest in using EDGE grew and in early 2019 UoA and ADHB embarked upon an evaluation of the system. In preparation for this, the system had to be tweaked to fit the NZ requirements and terminology. Working groups from UoA and ADHB worked closely with the EDGE team in Southampton to get the demo environment ready. After a lot of effort on all sides and a lot of patience from Southampton the one year evaluation licence was signed in June 2019. Three groups were selected from the University (Cancer Trials NZ, Surgical Trials Unit and the Liggins Institute) plus Cancer and Blood from ADHB to evaluate EDGE for their respective institutions. Evaluation between organizations was also assessed as ADHB act as a site and collaborator for several UoA trials. James and Tim Gibbons (EDGE Programme Manager) travelled to NZ in June of that year to conduct training with identified local administrators from each group as well as end users.
A range of trials and studies, workflows and attributes were added to the NZ EDGE demo environment by each group to test its suitability for our needs. A few months later the University evaluated the system against predetermined criteria, each of which scored highly leading to the UoA supporting its purchasing of a licence for EDGE. Cancer and Blood at ADHB had an equally positive experience and the decision was made to enter into a full licence agreement mirroring the set-up of the evaluation one. This licensing agreement was signed in June 2020.
Throughout the whole process of evaluating and adopting EDGE, ADHB and UoA worked very closely together, strengthening our collaboration and enabling all involved to get a better and faster understanding of EDGE’s capabilities as we leveraged off each other’s learnings and experiences. The original local administrators from each of the groups in the University that performed the evaluation have formed a superusers group and as more UoA users came on board that group has grown. This UoA group is also part of a wider superusers group that incorporates the ADHB local administrators. Both groups meet regularly to support and learn from each other as we are all still new to EDGE. The plan is that this group will grow to become the NZ EDGE superuser group in time.
Despite being early days for us, each user group is already reaping the benefits of using EDGE and can already see its potential to better support and oversee research across the whole UoA, ADHB and beyond.
Watch this space!
USER QUOTE
“We have really had no way of accurately tracking our clinical trial activity with any certainty up to this point and it became very evident that something was needed. As part of a collaboration with the University of Auckland, we were enthusiastic to join in and use EDGE and we are yet to be disappointed! ”