Current state of information technologies for the clinical research enterprise across academic medical centers

Abstract

Information technology (IT) to support clinical research has steadily grown over the past 10 years. Many new applications at the enterprise level are available to assist with the numerous tasks necessary in performing clinical research. However, it is not clear how rapidly this technology is being adopted or whether it is making an impact upon how clinical research is being performed. The Clinical Research Forum's IT Roundtable performed a survey of 17 representative academic medical centers (AMCs) to understand the adoption rate and implementation strategies within this field. The results were compared with similar surveys from 4 and 6 years ago. We found the adoption rate for four prominent areas of IT-supported clinical research had increased remarkably, specifically regulatory compliance, electronic data capture for clinical trials, data repositories for secondary use of clinical data, and infrastructure for supporting collaboration. Adoption of other areas of clinical research IT was more irregular with wider differences between AMCs. These differences appeared to be partially due to a set of openly available applications that have emerged to occupy an important place in the landscape of clinical research enterprise-level support at AMC's.

Figure 1

Comparison of response rates and responses regarding adoption of major categories of research IT infrastructure between the current (2011) and previous (2005 and 2007) surveys. (A) It demonstrates the response rate difference. (B) It depicts percentage increases for each category.

Figure 2

Percentage of respondents with completed installations, open‐source solutions cited by respondents, and most commonly cited solution cited by respondents (commercial or open source) for key elements of functionality in the categories of research compliance, electronic data capture, research repositories, and infrastructure.