SYSTEMS INTEGRATION

By Ann Neuer

Nov. 3, 2008 | Medidata Solutions is launching Medidata Developer Central, an online community to support sponsors in their efforts to integrate various clinical trial solutions with Medidata Rave, the company’s electronic data capture and clinical data management platform. Medidata Developer Central is intended to foster innovation around the Rave platform and is a free service available to users of the recently available Medidata Rave Web Services Application Programming Interface (API), as well as those in the midst of adopting or evaluating Rave Web Services API.

In going live with Medidata Developer Central, Glen de Vries, president, says, “Our customers are demanding the ability to leverage Rave across a broader set of clinical processes by integrating with interactive voice response (IVR), electronic patient reported outcomes (ePRO), and clinical trial management tools. The intent is to maximize and protect their investments in clinical trial technology.”

Glen de Vries

The Developer Central community will likely be made up of engineers or product managers responsible for integrating Rave with various technologies. As de Vries explains, developers will have access to a live copy of the Rave platform, searchable documentation, white papers, and guides, essentially all the Web-based tools needed to get started. “While developing at their desks, developers will be able to send data back and forth. You can be testing your own code,” says de Vries.  Members of the community will have an interactive forum where they can converse with and gain access to best practices from developers who are working on the same platform.

Medidata is looking to Developer Central to become a rich community. Over time, the company expects resulting innovations to drive the industry toward a seamless electronic clinical research environment with real-time, inbound and outbound data that adheres to Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) data standards. To jumpstart the process, Medidata became certified earlier this year on all eight CDISC Operational Data Model (ODM) use cases for importing and exporting clinical study data. This means that during the integration process, clients have access to Medidata’s ODM standards for all of the various components of their e-clinical process.

During the startup of Developer Central, a number of developers from clinical technology providers stepped forward to become pilot members. One of them, PHT Corp., a provider of ePRO solutions, used the Rave Web Services API to integrate several patient diaries from PHT’s LogPad System into Rave, a demo project that took just six days. Now PHT is aiming to leverage Developer Central’s community and resources to further enhance this solution by making the integration scalable and reliable across a wide range of scenarios.

Philip Lee

“We did the integration at record pace,” says Philip Lee, president and CEO of PHT. “The old way of integrating would have taken five to 10 times as long as it would have required us to create the electronic case report forms in Rave using their design tool, then we would have had to map their data fields into our database, and then set up the technical mechanism for uploading the data to Rave on a periodic basis.” Lee explains that in addition, the old method required extensive testing, as it constituted a custom integration project.

As integration continues, and with Medidata Developer Central becoming operational, the move toward extensive use of repeatable standards-based processes and forms will expand, saving precious time. “These efforts will greatly accelerate the ability of our clients to get value out of our platform,” says de Vries. 
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This story first appeared in eCliniqua,one of Bio-IT World’s free e-newsletters. Subscribe here.