Improving the Site Experience – the 2nd Annual Cenduit Hackathon
The Cenduit Digital Pack is our global team of elite eClinical industry developers. This group of all-stars has a passion to improve patient safety, the courage to challenge the status quo, and the persistence to ensure technology is done right in an industry full of risk.
The Digital Pack does brilliant work along Cenduit’s technology roadmap – and within the confines of our highly regulated industry – to benefit sponsors, sites and help patients achieve better healthcare outcomes. Last year, Cenduit established our inaugural Hackathon to give the Pack the opportunity to ask “what if?” and develop new eClinical technologies without corporate or regulatory constraints.
Democratizing the eClinical Innovation Process
The idea and core belief behind the Hackathon: Innovation comes in many forms. Often, the people best equipped to address today’s eClinical technology complexities are those who work with the technology on a day-to-day basis. Our collective aim includes maximizing our full team’s diverse talent, experience, and vision within all levels of the organization.
The freedom to create without preconceived notions about how the technology must be used enables the Pack to develop technology features that they might not be able to otherwise create in ongoing software releases. The Hackathon also helps Cenduit leverage new explorations to consistently improve and iterate from within our agile platform. Even if the ideas and data that emerge from the Hackathon aren’t immediately implemented, they often inform development direction, or become a part of our future development calendar.
A Worldwide Week of eClinical Creativity
During last year’s Hackathon, the winning technology enhanced a mobile app framework within the Cenduit IRT platform. For this year’s event, the Pack focused on how to improve the site experience through better use of data and reducing site burden.
The Hackathon this past summer consisted of five teams spanning Cenduit operations across the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific. Teams had three business days to develop their technology, followed by a day of peer-to-peer judging, with teams demonstrating working prototypes of ideas in real time. Finalists presented to our senior management team, who selected the winning hack.
This year’s challenge generated creative, practical and tactical ideas, and real applications that we plan to incorporate into our broad platform. These ran the gamut from how data can make sites’ lives easier by obviating the need for site visits, to incremental usability improvements. Some ideas stemmed from an operational perspective, while others were much broader in scope, such as real-time translations from a text and voice to text perspective.
The Winning Hack – One-Click Visibility for Site Users
The winning hack focused primarily on how patients are managed, and how critical information for sites is presented within the Cenduit IRT interface. One-click visibility across patient demographics, visits and materials will make it faster and easier for site users to make key role-based decisions or edits. At-a-glance indicators enable site users to determine the status of each patient along their clinical trial journey. The team demonstrated a working proof of concept, interacting directly with our IRT platform and critical back-end components.
Enriching Contributors’ Experiences in Development and Innovation
The Hackathon is a meaningful event for every participant. Developers take it seriously and work hard, but they also have a good time, with a friendly competitive spirit embedded within this global initiative.
Cenduit Enterprise Architect Chris Driver summed up the feeling of the Hackathon: “As we approached this year’s challenge with a focus on the site experience, the team put a lot of thought into how our site users interact with patients and the visibility they have at-a-glance to make important decisions along their clinical trial journey. With the freedom to innovate, the Hackathon creates a lot of buzz and friendly banter around our offices, as the teams work to develop a solution and Proof of Concept that could enhance the productivity and convenience of site personnel. Being a part of a fantastic team of thinkers and creators really encourages each person to ideate in a fun and exciting way, outside of our normal project and release cycle. I’m proud of all the teams and their efforts around our 2nd Annual Cenduit Digital Pack Hackathon!”
Want to join the Cenduit Digital Pack and global team of innovators? Visit our Careers Page.
Posted by Chris Dailey, Vice President of Global Technology and Product Management; and Chris Davies, Manager, Research & Development
