User Profile
Full Name: Will Goff
Job Title: Project Support Manager
Email: Will.Goff@uhb.nhs.uk
Organisation: Institute of Translational Medicine, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Trust
EDGE user since: 2019
About you
1. How and why did you move into your current role within clinical research?
My first role within the department was actually looking after the facilities for the new Institute of Translational Medicine when it was built 11 years ago, Research looked interesting so I joined the grants team and then found my nerdy niche which was analytics and digital automation.
2. What does your role within the R&D team at UBH entail on a typical day?
My job involves looking after all of the data we get internally and from EDGE for our clinical trials. I enjoy building Power BI reports and automations in Power Automate.
3. How does the patient and research landscape currently look at your site/organisation?
Busy! We have issued C&C for 310 site projects and recruited over 4,500 participants since April.
Your use of EDGE
4. You’ve been using EDGE for over 7 years. How do you currently utilise EDGE in your daily role?
As a lead administrator, I'm responsible for organising all of the reports and using the API functionality to get the data into our model so that teams have the latest information at their finger tips!
5. As a Lead Administrator in EDGE, you oversee the system’s back-end infrastructure at your Trust. What does the day-to-day governance and user management look like at Birmingham?
I also enjoy setting up and training new users in the department on the system, its great to meet new faces and show them how the system supports so many different bits of work around the department.
Our forms and workflows are well established now but we will often need some tweaks to custom lists or be adding some new fields based on change requests or new information people want to collect if it sits best in EDGE.
6. Currently, what is your favourite EDGE reporting tools?
The reporting function and EDGE data when linked to CPMS data is really beneficial – being able to filter anonymised patient feedback by site or delivery teams so they can see the good news.
7. What kind of key performance metrics or bottleneck trends are you able to uncover when using EDGE’s reporting functionality?
We use EDGE for recruitment, set-up and time to first participant, how long it is taking us to process amendments etc. I’d say the main bottleneck that EDGE Forms and Workflows are helping us to uncover is within study set-up. With ambitious targets of 60 days for set-up and 30 days to recruitment, EDGE has enabled us to identify where delays are occurring across the process. For studies still in progress, this helps draw attention to areas requiring remedial action; where targets have already been missed, we can drill further into the underlying reviews to pinpoint the cause and determine whether delays are internal or sponsor-led.
8. As a Project Support Manager, you see how the data flows through the research lifecycle. What is the most common operational bottleneck that you see staff encounter, and how do you configure EDGE to help tackle this?
It has to be study set-up, especially with the new ambitions set out as part of the NIHR's 150 day strategy. EDGE and the use of custom forms help us break down larger processes, involving different delivery, governance and service support teams into smaller parts – EDGE reporting and Power BI helps us tie it all back together for oversight and insight to spot problems early and get our studies open and sites ready as quickly as possible for participants!
9. What are your/site’s plans for using and developing EDGE over the next 6-12 months
We'd like to do more with forms at a user level so we can collect and report more information about our Chief and Principal Investigators. We also currently don’t add any patient identifiable information to EDGE but want to explore how the addition of NHS ID could help us link our research participants in EDGE to our internal UHB hospital data.
Clinical research
10. What is your “bigger picture?” That is, what do you find most fulfilling about your job?
I think the thing I find most fulfilling about my job is being able to look at old and inefficient processes and bring them into EDGE where the data can be tried to the studies and sites, and making sure the data is nicely validated. Add in some automation and it can be really rewarding when the more boring or admin heavy tasks are then much quicker to complete so delivery teams have more time to focus on participants and the parts of their job which require their personal input.
11. One clinical research superpower that you wish you possessed:
Knowing what data and reports people will ask from me next week or next month, today...
Personal touch
12. One thing that inspires you:
A coffee, good playlist and intermittent pets for my pomeranian mix Mimi while working from home boosts my productivity by 100%.
13. One thing that people might not know about you:
Big nerd inside and outside of work, 130k+ gamerscore on Xbox 😅
Interview by Ken Brackstone: k.brackstone@soton.ac.uk