MN-CMS starts to use PowerTrials functions

An important milestone has occurred for the MN-CMS project: Cork University Maternity Hospital (CUMH) and University Hospital Kerry (UHK) have both gone live with Cerner’s PowerTrials Clinical trials Managment functionality. Within the first week of go-live, research investigators and midwives in CUMH have identified and enrolled dozens of participants for their current research, significantly reducing the time needed in antenatal booking clinics and labour wards. PowerTrials allows the HSE to quickly and easily identify people / patients with specific conditions that make them relevant to join a clinical trials cohort, and then allows them to manage and track the patient, also making it clear to other care providers using MN-CMS that that individual is involved in a trial.

This is a great achievement for Irish perinatal research and significant proof that PowerTrials can support multi-centre and very niche studies.

The go-live week in preview

During the go-live week, the national and site IT back office teams worked together to build new 3 protocols and discern pre-screening rules for the following studies:

• IMPROvED – This study will develop a clinically robust predictive blood test for pre-eclampsia, using novel metabolite and protein biomarkers. This blood test is targeted to all first time mothers during early pregnancy to determine their risk for this major pregnancy complication.
• NeoView –This study will provide families with virtual visitation to their child in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and resources to help them throughout their hospital stay.
• PARROT – This is a multi-centre stepped wedge RCT of plasma PIGF (Placenta Growth Factor) measurement in women who present with suspected pre-eclampsia prior to 37 weeks gestation. The women who are at highest risk receive greater surveillance with a decrease in maternal adverse outcomes. Those at lower risk can be managed without unnecessary admission and iatrogenic pre-term delivery.

The pre-screening rules needed maternity-specific inclusion/exclusion criteria defined such as gestational ages of pregnant women and neonates, and first time and multiple pregnancies.  All these special criteria were possible to build with the discern rules editing tool.

This is also the first PowerTrials project in Europe where Cerner are carrying out a benefits study to assess the impact the solution will have on research efficiencies.  Prior to go-live, we had collected baseline data such as monthly study recruitment trends and pre-screening durations per participant.  After the studies were up and running on the system, the research midwives were happy with the results.  We look forward to visiting the users in a few weeks’ time to measure post go-live time and cost savings.

It’s a small but powerful piece of functionality that will go a long way to proving the value of the rich, national database that MN-CMS provides.