Improvement Spotlight
Succes Story Feature: Improvement in Activation of Clinical Trials ACCC
Today’s Success Story highlights a project led by the Clinical Trials team at the Arthur J.E. Child Comprehensive Cancer Centre.
Define the Opportunity
Timely clinical trial activation is essential to attracting trial sponsors and ensuring patients have access to innovative treatment options. As clinical trial activity continues to grow, the Clinical Trials team at the Arthur J.E. Child Comprehensive Cancer Centre identified opportunities to improve the efficiency, visibility and coordination of its trial activation processes. With the goal of increasing the number of clinical trials activated each year, the team set out to streamline workflows and reduce administrative effort throughout the trial launch process.
Build Understanding
Using process improvement methodologies, the team mapped the trial activation process and identified opportunities to enhance collaboration, information flow and process consistency across multiple teams. Key opportunities included:
Enhancing digital tracking capabilities to support more streamlined management of clinical trial activities.
Improving visibility of trial status information across stakeholder groups.
Streamlining legal review and approval process to support more efficient trial activation.
Strengthening coordination and communication between teams involved in clinical trial launch activities.
Act to Improve
The team implemented several practical solutions, including:
Introducing a centralized Microsoft 365-based tracking solution for all clinical trials, connected across supporting teams.
Developing a real-time dashboard that provides stakeholders with reliable and accessible trial status information.
Standardizing legal review and approval processes, initiating reviews earlier in the process, and establishing twice-weekly huddles between Legal and Trial Launch Team.
Leveraging digital tools to improve information sharing and collaboration throughout the activation process.
Sustain Results
The improvement team achieved:
Enhanced digital workflows that support more streamlined and coordinated trial activation process.
10% reduction in trial activation timelines.
A significant reduction in status inquiries, allowing teams to focus more time on value-added work.
Improved visibility, collaboration and access to reliable information across stakeholder groups.
What’s next? The team continues to drive for improvement by:
Exploring additional automation opportunities to streamline team communication and collaboration between departments.
Continuing to partner with teams to optimize clinical trial launch subprocesses.
If you're interested in learning more about this great project, contact Susanna.Town@cancercarealberta.ca.
Improvement Team Members: Susanna Town (Clinical Research Unit Manager), Dr. Jose Monzon (Clinical Research Unit Medical Lead), Andrea Young (Clinical Research Unit Intake Coordinator), Kimberly Great (Trial Launch Team Lead), Kelly Mclachlan (Clinical Research Unit Project Manager); Project Support: Sandra Lavorel (Process Improvement), Monika Podkowa (Project Management).
