HHTU powers health research with Intelligent Content Management
It doesn’t matter how small your team is. If you’re working in the life sciences arena — or any industry, for that matter — you’re beholden to the same highly specific rules and regulations around data that any enterprise organization would be.
The Hull Health Trials Unit (HHTU) is essentially a life sciences startup within a larger, more conventional academic environment at the University of Hull in the UK. A collaboration between this university, Hull York Medical School (HYMS), and Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (HUTH), HHTU facilitates collaboration between clinicians and researchers on the design, delivery, and analysis of high-impact health research.
A team of three people core to HHTU operates in a highly complex regulated environment, with explicit data requirements and the need to collaborate with various external stakeholders in specific ways. They’re under pressure to deliver regulated studies with the appropriate levels of content governance, controls over sensitive patient data, and residency for that data.
John Turgoose, the Information Systems Manager, says: “The journey to Box was to essentially allow us to deliver the requirements of running clinical trials, but with a very small team, and we needed to hit the ground running. What Box has given us is the ability to punch above our weight.”
The part content plays in the lifecycle of a clinical trial
Turgoose describes how a project typically comes to life, and how Intelligent Content Management plays a critical role in the process.
A clinician working within a hospital or the National Health Service (NHS) often approaches HHTU with a research idea. HHTU helps shape the initial proposal, then stays involved all the way through delivery of the study and actual analysis.
The team works with a mixture of internal and external collaborators, which can include clinicians, sponsors, charities, government agencies, educational institutions, health economists, and more. Sometimes, these collaborations cross international borders, which further complicates the regulation guardrails. The myriad of content that results from a study includes anything from quality management documentation to standard operating procedures (SOPs) to back-office administration to consent forms to sensitive patient data.
“From a regulatory standpoint,” Turgoose says, “we’re responsible for the integrity and validation of platforms we use to process research data. Box underpins our file storage capability and supports the cross-organizational collaboration typical of the projects we deliver.”
The value of Box is partly to enable a complete audit of each activity along with unlimited version history. A project team can always retrospectively provide a full detailed narrative of how the trial was delivered, which enables ongoing oversight from research sponsors.
The potential AI brings to content for HHTU
But Box is not just a secure, compliant place to store and retrieve content. With Intelligent Content Management, HHTU can take advantage of AI and metadata capabilities to make workflows more efficient and successful, with real impact to the mission of the organization.
For instance, HHTU is obliged to keep a record of all decision-making processes, and metadata can help automatically tag the minutes of meetings for later auditing. Within a clinical trial, there’s always a raft of documentation. Documents can be very long, with multiple different versions that change over time. If a project stakeholder makes a change to a 60-page long protocol, HHTU needs to be able to ensure that the change is also reflected in the data management plan and the corresponding statistical analysis. Turgoose envisions using AI to conduct an internal audit around document consistency in general.
He says, “Leveraging AI can help us remain lean. We’re doing a lot of this work funded by charity — by people running marathons and raising money to fund some of this important research. We can do that more efficiently, more quickly.”
The clinical potential of Box AI, Forms, and Hubs
Turgoose is also excited about the potential Box innovations bring to the business.
For instance, he says, “Using Hubs to create a view of each of the projects relevant to a particular team seems really powerful.” Box Hubs has the potential to support content portals for individual clinical trials. Both internal and external stakeholders assigned to a project will have one place they can access the files and data they need. He also imagines using Box Hubs to support staff onboarding and training. “We’re small,” he says, “but we’re growing.”
He plans to use Box Forms to automate and enable certain workflows. For instance, when an external partner in a trial needs to create a consent form, Box Forms could be used to trigger signatures and approvals from the right people at the right times and then save the finalized forms back to the right places within Box.
“Whilst we are early in our Box AI journey,” he says, “it could support us through the lifecycle of clinical trials, helping us develop everything from drafting patient-facing documentation in a language and style appropriate to the patient population to using AI to ask questions of all our policy and SOPs.”
These things are possible because “You’ve got AI embedded where our data is,” confirms Turgoose. “I’m inspired to see where we can go with AI.”
In the meantime, HHTU has already seen the ROI of Intelligent Content Management in the ways it has made work more efficient and helped them get to the finish line of trials faster. “We've been able to land some quite significant grants,” Turgoose even says. “And Box has been an important part of that.”