OREANDA-NEWS. May 30, 2016.  “TransCelerate BioPharma’s Shared Investigator Platform (SIP) Initiative—launched in January—has its sights set on changing the relationship between sites and pharmaceutical companies working on clinical trials,” reports Clinical Informatics News (CIN). “TransCelerate member companies have worked with Cognizant, the overall systems integrator and service provider, to facilitate a site’s interaction with multiple sponsors and enable study planning, start-up and conduct through a single point of access,” writes CIN.

In bringing together the different products and organizations that are part of the SIP ecosystem and supporting individual member companies who choose to adopt the platform, Bhaskar Sambasivan, Cognizant’s Vice President of Life Sciences, indicates that the company has worked to transform business processes in order to bring about efficiencies in clinical trials by honing in on the interactions between sponsors and investigators.

Cognizant’s main contributions to the project have included requirements elicitation, design, architecture, development, validation, hosting, rollout and help desk support of the complete platform.

This role has come along with some hefty challenges, however, such as working with multiple member companies to agree on a common set of functionality so that each company’s unique manner of conducting clinical trials is accommodated. In addition, there is a need to ensure that every product that is part of the SIP ecosystem is well-integrated and functions seamlessly within the agreed upon parameters, Sambasivan adds.

“It (SIP initiative) is absolutely the first of its kind,” says Jackie Kent, TransCelerate’s SIP Initiative leader. The goal is to simplify investigative site collaboration with multiple clinical trial sponsors and reduce the administrative load for site staff, which is accomplished by increasing the automation and re-use of data while reducing the number of requests for information. In other words, Kent adds, the aim is to become a one-stop shop for an investigator site.

The relationship between the vendor partners and the member companies is unique, Kent explains, and while the software development lifecycle has been an enjoyable dilemma to work through, the contractual piece of it has been complicated. Ultimately, the system integrator—Cognizant—has managed all of the contracts.