ECS for Clinical Trials

EQUICARE CS (ECS) was original designed for cancer survivorship, but it’s powerful enough to support a wide variety of other applications, including, as we recently discovered, Clinical Trials.  How can you use a tool aimed at survivorship for clinical trials?

Well, during a recent product management meeting, the team got into this discussion about clinical trials because one of our newly installed customers was looking for organizational support for a trial.  Once we started talking about it, we quickly realized that ECS could easily be used to support clinical trials. So much of clinical trials work is keeping track of stuff – medical tests, appointments, data submissions etc. ECS was designed to help the clinician keep track of survivorship tasks, and clinical trials are like survivorship but with another level of detail – specific to clinical trials people


So we decided to look into how the survivorship platform could be extended and used for a trial.  We investigated details of this customer’s trial,  the B-49 trial run by the NSABP people. Now, let’s be clear. There are tasks to keep track of for a survivorship patient but, man, they pale in comparison to all the criteria and detail of a clinical trial!   Delving deep into it this made us wonder how the clinical trials people managed without a formal tool. And for years!! These patients have to be followed up for years!!

Long story short, we did a bit of work and created items that would streamline the workflow for clinical trials clinicians including eligibility criteria forms (like the one below)  and task planning tools.

Eligibiltiy page2

We also created a follow-up plan (in survivorship lingo), which was designed to track all the tasks to complete prior to randomization.  We then made a second form designed just like a survivorship follow-up plan, that is, with tasks that needed to be completed at set intervals as dictated by the study protocol.

Care plan clinical trials

Using these forms the clinical trials people could work through an electronic form for eligibility (in all its gory detail) while having the 1st follow-up organized with an easy, visual method for checking off the tasks that have/have not been completed. Once the patient has had their treatment, the 2nd follow-up plan could be applied so the patient and clinician know which tasks need to be done and when. It’s a great visual for explaining for the patient as well.

Check list - clinical

Along with these items, the clinical user also gets all the other great things that go along with the Equicare system, such as:

  • reminders about tasks that are due,
  • alerts about lab tests being completed,
  • a worklist of patients that they are responsible for,
  • education materials that can be assigned to the patient
  • patient access to health care info without clinical user intervention.

If your organization would like to use ECS to help support clinical trials, we would love to help. Please contact us and we can help you get going.

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