A Multinational Pharmaceutical and Medical Technology Corporation
Improving Clinical Trial Processes With an Enhanced Collaboration Platform
What if... we could improve the development speed and scalability of a critical clinical data collaboration platform?
Our client is an American multinational corporation that manufactures health care products and provides related services for the global consumer, pharmaceutical, and medical devices markets.
Clinical Study Review Tool Delayed the Progress of Life-Saving Advancements
Access to accurate and trustworthy clinical data is paramount to our client's clinical review teams as they proactively collaborate on trials and ultimately deliver innovations to market. But the company's aging legacy clinical data collaboration platform was costly, manual, and cumbersome to maintain, and requests for new functionality went through a tedious ticketing process across multiple DevOps teams. These teams could not efficiently communicate or work in tandem, which led to slow update releases.
The pharmaceutical leader needed to integrate multiple disparate data sources into an intuitive, robust, and self-documenting clinical data collaboration environment that enables clinicians, assisted by machine intelligence, to enhance data cleaning, review, and analysis.
We recommended a continuous integration and deployment solution using open-source Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). This would allow for faster development and deployment of updates and fixes to the clinical data review hub with reduced risk of deployment defects, system crashes, and other issues.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) deployment speed and scaling capabilities made this the ideal choice for the DevOps backbone of this project as it would enable developers to quickly and easily fix bugs, improve, and scale.
Automating and Facilitating System Updates and New Functionality
Historically, the data review team would identify issues with the clinical data review system and submit them to the company's development team for resolution. However, the manual and disconnected process of managing and segregating Kubernetes clusters meant developers had to wait for other teams to complete their work before they could start theirs. This was incredibly challenging as the team had members spread across the globe and in different time zones, which caused communication roadblocks and workflow inefficiencies.
Our solution, built with Amazon EKS, simplifies deployment and operation of microservice containers by automating platform scalability as well as server workload and redundancy. EKS automates Kubernetes' cumbersome and inherently complex processes to allow developers to more quickly and easily identify and fix defects.
The result is a pipeline process that supports multiple development environments so developers can independently and efficiently perform the work relevant to them.
From top to bottom, the updated data review platform makes for a quicker, easier, and more reliable user experience for both clinical review staff and developers so they can get on with the business of innovating ways to improve the quality of life.
Results
Supporting the Business of Improving Quality of Life
From top to bottom, the updated data review platform makes for a quicker, easier, and more reliable user experience for both clinical review staff and developers so they can get on with the business of innovating ways to improve the quality of life.
Previously, user requests for changes would take precious time to deploy. Change requests are now assigned, identified, and resolved more efficiently. Developers leverage a staging environment to test and correct issues, which lets developers push fixes to production with confidence.
We're an Advanced Amazon Consulting Partner with more than a decade of AWS experience and are consistently ranked by Modern Healthcare as a leading healthcare IT and management consulting firm. This, combined with our deep clinical trial, data, and platforming expertise, made us the perfect partner to help our client with this critical initiative.
