Goal Is to Streamline and Strengthen Research Administration and Compliance Oversight
BEAVERTON, OR, December 15, 2009 – Click Commerce, the pioneer in customer-configurable eResearch solutions, announced today that the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) is adopting Click Commerce’s eResearch Portal software to fully automate Institutional Review Board (IRB), Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) and Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) processes. By integrating and centralizing the three applications on a single platform, UMMS will eliminate redundant administrative processes while improving accuracy and overall compliance oversight.
In the initial phase, the Click Commerce IRB software will provide full lifecycle support of human subjects related studies. From a single web site, widely dispersed investigative teams and ancillary committees throughout UMMS will be able to collaborate and manage IRB proposals from electronic creation, submission and review to approval, monitoring and reporting of research projects. Click Commerce Professional Services will also provide a broad set of tools, best practices, and training to ensure UMMS’s ability to configure the system to its research environment as well as to enable university personnel to continuously improve internal processes and forms. When combined with ongoing Click Software Support Services, the eResearch Portal platform provides an easily adaptable framework that can match the pace of change at the medical school.
Part of a multi-phase deployment strategy which will incorporate sponsored research funding and clinical trials management, the IRB, IBC, and IACUC applications will deploy in parallel starting next year.
“Reducing the amount of time researchers have to spend on administrative tasks across the board is paramount as our research volume grows,” said Dr. Gary Schneider, PhD, Associate Vice Provost for Research, UMMS. “Meeting this challenge requires flexibility enough to introduce administrative functions on our terms and continuously improve those functions over time. After an extensive requirements analysis and detailed Request for Proposal (RFP) evaluation, Click’s customer configurable eResearch platform combined with strong customer references gave us the confidence we sought before committing to a new solution.”
“We are pleased to help UMMS address increasingly complex administrative issues that threaten to slow research momentum,” said Nick Stier, president of Click Commerce. “Click’s platform and shared approach to meeting our customers’ unique needs are well-suited to UMMS’s aggressive multi-phase implementation strategy and their desire to lead the development in follow-on phases.”
The University of Massachusetts Medical School and many other leading research institutions use Click Commerce’s browser-based, secure eResearch Portal to automate a wide range of administrative processes, including those associated with IRB, IACUC, COI, Grants, and Clinical Trials Participant Tracking and Billing, among others.
About the University of Massachusetts Medical School
The University of Massachusetts Medical School has built a reputation as a world-class research institution, consistently producing noteworthy advances in clinical and basic research. The Medical School attracts more than $240 million in research funding annually, 80 percent of which comes from federal funding sources. The work of UMMS researcher Craig Mello, PhD, an investigator of the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and his colleague Andrew Fire, PhD, then of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, toward the discovery of RNA interference was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and has spawned a new and promising field of research, the global impact of which may prove astounding. UMMS is the academic partner of UMass Memorial Health Care, the largest health care provider in Central Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.umassmed.edu.
About Click Commerce
Click Commerce provides solutions for the business of research to leading academic medical centers and research institutions throughout North America. More information can be found at www.clickcommerce.com.
