Systems that are readily accessible at the click of a button are indispensable assets for clinical study sites to efficiently manage and execute essential tasks. Rapid access provisioning and effective access management to these systems are essential for ensuring timely study startup and streamlined operations.
However, as the number of systems grows for each sponsor, what initially appears as a boon can quickly become burdensome due to a multitude of challenges, leading to poor user experience, delays in study startup and operational inefficiencies.
We have often heard site professionals express concerns regarding the following issues.
The current method of provisioning and managing access heavily relies on on-site staff collaborating with system owners and support teams through email and service requests—such as tickets. However, this approach highlights the challenges due to the following factors:
The effective management of user access often takes a back seat due to the absence of unified tools, readily available solutions and the complexity involved. Our approach addresses this challenge by implementing services, establishing an information repository and employing automation to streamline access provisioning and governance through intelligent rule-based mechanisms, thereby minimizing human intervention, process hand-offs and reducing time. This solution is founded on two primary pillars:
Deploying identity management services facilitates the registration of site users into the sponsor ecosystem, thereby allowing sponsor-agnostic credentials—known as site user credentials—to seamlessly integrate with the sponsor’s single sign-on (SSO) system.
The typical user access journey involves several interconnected processes that further branch out for each system.
Through automation, these processes can be centralized using an orchestration engine governed by business rules. Our solution automates the following processes with minimal intervention from support teams:
Automation reduces the time taken to provision access by up to 80% and removes the web of processes of follow-ups, incident tracking and figuring out required roles and applications.
The two-part solution creates a unified ecosystem for streamlined and effective access provisioning and management, resulting in the following benefits:
The automated user access and identity management solution accelerates the onboarding process for site users, eliminating the difficulties associated with managing multiple credentials and routing requests through tickets and support staff. This solution offers a centralized repository of information for user data, applications, and access, facilitating efficient and automated provisioning and de-provisioning of users.
By Vinay Kumar, Director, Site Engagement, GSK
Brian Grant, Strategy Lead, GSK
Vishal Kabra, & Parijit Khokle, ZS