Kathy Miedema, Oracle Applications User Experience

The redesigned Remote Data Capture 4.5.3 application, for Oracle’s customers in the pharmaceutical world, is already making clinical trials easier for investigators around the globe. That’s because key customers, stakeholders in pharmaceutical companies, had a hand in deciding just how the new application would work best.

The software is used by investigators, often physicians, who collect data on patients in pharmaceutical clinical trials as they test new drugs. Earlier generations of the application were slow and could be difficult to use. They required plug-in applications for PDFs, which take time to launch. Investigators who might need to travel between a hospital and a clinic, for example, found earlier generations of the application cumbersome, and they needed to be able to access patient data more easily.

“We worked with the usability team and the customers to take a step back and get a fresh perspective on the whole business process around investigators entering data about subjects for a clinical trial,” said Greg Jones, Vice President of Applications Development in Oracle’s Health Sciences Global Business Unit (HSGBU). “By taking that step, and taking the business process focus, we were able to design and develop a much improved data experience for the investigator. This is a tool that they can really use.”

“The presentation of the data on the screen needs to be very straightforward and intuitive in clinical trials,” said Michele Becci, the Senior Director of Global Strategic Accounts in HSGBU. So making usability the No. 1 issue, she said, and focusing on productivity, ease of use and efficiency, helped steer the redesign in the right direction.

Image 1. The newly redesigned Remote Data Capture 4.5.3, which is used in clinical trials by pharmaceutical companies, allows physicians conducting the trials to manipulate data more easily. Previous generations of the application used a slow-moving PDF that required a plug-in application. The new version of RDC features small menus easily accessible by right-clicking on the mouse, such as the one in the top left above. Physicians can also call up data by specific categories, such as Year Diagnosed, as shown in the menu on the right. Click here to view image detail

Members of the user experience (UX) team conducted several tests on new prototypes as the months-long redesign took place, which allowed Oracle’s teams to fine-tune the application and ensure that RDC 4.5.3 went beyond a simple new icon or two. The results were that the application’s look and feel improved, and the application became easier to use, Becci said. Very little training is needed to use RDC 4.5.3, and the overall satisfaction with the application has certainly improved. “It’s been very, very well received by customers,” she said.

One of the most important solutions to come out of the redesign was dropping the need for the plug-in application. Older generations of RDC had a poor work flow, and entering a patient’s data was not integrated well with other parts of the application, according to Kailash Dattkaya, an interaction designer and manager who worked on the redesign of RDC. Eliminating the need for a plug-in went a long way in boosting the speed of RDC, improving the ease-of-use and increasing productivity for users.

Investigators and auditors, who review the work of the trial investigators, are now able to interact with RDC 4.5.3’s data entry programs, even expanding what they can view with drill-down pages or calling up specific data columns for a side-by-side comparison, instead of toggling back and forth or opening up multiple screens. Key actions on the tool bar are easier to reach, terminology has been changed so that users have a clearer picture of what they need to do to accomplish their tasks, and the task flow of the application has been redesigned.

“RDC is optimized for investigators – that was our challenge, to make sure we delivered a great product so that pharmaceutical organizations could offer a great tool for investigators to use in their studies,” Jones said. “We were able to design and develop a better data collection experience for the investigator, an application or tool that the investigators could really use.”

“It was clear that customers were very happy with the solutions that we built,” said Madhuri Kolhatkar, Director of Oracle’s Applications Unlimited User Experience team. “We showed the health sciences sector that a good user experience can really make a difference to the product. “