Research Effort Tracking Application (RETA)
From Business Intelligence
Contents |
[edit] Project Contact
If you have questions or would like more information, please contact Theresa Royce-Westcott (troycew@med.umich.edu).
[edit] Project Description
The Leadership Team in the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center (UMCCC) Clinical Trials Office (CTO) developed the Research Effort Tracking Application (RETA), which captures all tasks completed for all sponsored projects and enables staff to track their effort on these tasks. Initially a desktop program, it was upgraded in 2008 to a scalable web-based system to ensure ease of access and use by the clinical research teams. RETA is used to charge sponsored accounts, certify effort, negotiate budgets, and adjust staffing.
Data from RETA is also integrated with data from VELOS to provide reports and summarize information that is used at all levels; team, departmental, and institutional. The comprehensive data entered by an average of 30 data managers and regulators during 2006 through 2008 on an average of 261 therapeutic trials per year with total accruals averaging about 480 per year has allowed the CTO to assess projects and provide projections at a level as yet unseen in the industry according to the team’s literature search. This advancement has garnered the CTO national attention.
[edit] Business Need
Improve billing, staffing, and management of staff and resources to support the following:
- Track staff time spent on each particular study they were assigned to.
- Bill each study accurately for the time required to complete it
- Plan for project staffing needs and develop cost-saving measures in terms of how staff members use their time.
[edit] System/Application & Data Sources
The effort-specific data in RETA can be integrated with study and patient specific data from VELOS, a clinical trials management system that was developed through cooperation between the U-M and VELOS Inc.
[edit] Project Purpose, Scope, & Deliverables
- Analyze the funding process for studies and standardize it to reduce variability.
- Help customers use the limited CTO resource in the most effective way possible.
- Provide staff utilization data in response to requests from investigators, programs and Cancer Center leadership so that costs can be allocated to the appropriate project sponsor.
- Determine the complexity or length of studies and measure effort requirements to provide:
- Accurate, appropriate negotiation of study budgets and billing for services pertaining to studies that account for the amount of effort a study might require, staffing salaries, complexity, or length of the project.
- Identification of how much time staff dedicates to study-related work and how much to staff meetings, sick time, vacation time, and other non-study-related tasks.
- Analysis of the relationship between project cost and staff requirements based on factors such as the entity sponsoring the project, rate at which a study enrolls patients, and enrollment goal for the project.
- Information about the efficiency of conducting various types of studies to obtain coverage for costs to the CTO that were not previously realized, such as: use of a CRO to conduct a study, changes in study monitors, start-up costs for studies that never accrue participants.
- Provide the following reports, all of which allow specification of a subgroup and a reporting timeframe:
- RETA group payroll report: Links time associated with a sponsored project to the appropriate short code, allowing the CTO to charge for actual time spent on a project rather than estimated budget amounts. Time is entered directly into the payroll system, so projects are charged in real time, providing more accurate billing and serving as the basis for effort certification for each pooled staff member, which improves compliance and accountability.
- RETA detailed personnel effort report: Provides supervisors with a detailed snapshot of how a staff member has been dividing time between projects. This report gives the specifics necessary for performance review, detailed explanations to study principal investigators, and review of workload distribution.
- RETA group effort report: Presents the same data points as the personnel effort report, but allows managers to review aggregate data for their team. As a result, managers can review short-term views of their team’s effort on projects, as well as long-term views to reconcile budget estimates and project future staffing needs and workload distribution.
- RETA project effort by role report: Identifies what aspects of a project make it more complex and as a result more costly and time consuming. Cumulative data from various project reports allows accurate prediction of the cost of conducting a similar project. This hard data have provided information needed to negotiate appropriate funding for various types of projects. This report has also fostered improved communication between the study team and the principal investigator on the study.
- FTE effort by research type: Displays how data managers and regulators divide their time among the various types of study sponsors, enabling analysis based on sponsor type, accrual rate, whether or not a study reaches accrual goal, therapeutic program specific differences, and so on.
- FTE dashboard report: Provides a comprehensive look at the effort required on all studies as compared with the budgeted effort; presents the budgeted effort versus actual effort per patient as opposed to per project. Presents views by CTO as a whole, by therapeutic program, or by specific PI; and provides a view of several key factors in one document, giving managers and principal investigators a snapshot of complex financial and staffing feedback across a large number of projects.
[edit] Audience/Users
The following groups in the CTO use RETA:
- Finance group
- Principal investigators
- Others involved in the research
[edit] Project Sponsors/Partners
- Comprehensive Cancer Center (UMCCC) Clinical Trials Office (CTO)
[edit] Duration/Timeline
RETA was developed approximately three years ago. As a result of the implementation of RETA, the percentage of CTO funding coming from Cancer Center funds has decreased from 56% in 2006 to 44% in 2007 and 39% in 2008. Average data management effort is under budget 12.07 hours per accrual per year and accruing 1.62 less patients per year than estimated.
Two abstracts, which were accepted for presentation at a upcoming national conference detail how the Clinical Trials Network (CTN) and its member institutions might save time and money by changing how they write protocols and by modifying procedures for collecting the aggregate safety data from all institutions. On a larger scale, if multiple institutions were to use RETA and pool their data, the collective information may have a significant influence in how industry sponsors, other institutions and cooperative groups develop their clinical trials.