MADISON, Wis., April 10, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- More than 200 clinical research professionals attended the 13th Onsemble conference — a record-breaking attendance in the history of the semi-annual event, which gathers members of the clinical research community to collaborate on key operational issues. The Onsemble 2012 Spring Conference, hosted by Forte Research Systems and co-hosted by the University of California, San Francisco, was held March 7-9 at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF in San Francisco, Calif.
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Attendees included representatives from clinical trials office leadership, research associates, data managers, and regulatory managers from cancer centers, children's hospitals, research consortia, and academic health centers. The majority of attendees are users of Forte's flagship product, the OnCore clinical and translational research software.
Bridging the Gap in Clinical Research
Building on the theme of "Bridging the Gap in Clinical Research," the conference featured several special guest speakers who shared their vision for the future of the industry. Leadership from UCSF, including Frank McCormick, PhD, FRS, Director of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Susan Desmond-Hellmann, MD, UCSF Chancellor, spoke to the community and shared the University's perspective on advancing research.
The conference also featured a presentation by Deborah Zarin, MD, Director of ClinicalTrials.gov, who discussed the current and upcoming requirements for registration and reporting related to clinical trials. Linda Sullivan, Vice President of Operations at Metrics Champion Consortium, shared the value of collecting and comparing metrics across sites and invited attendees to join the initiatives of the consortium.
The agenda included presentations on critical issues, such as billing compliance requirements and coverage analysis, management of networks, effort tracking, and patient registries. Breakout sessions were dedicated to essential operational topics such as reporting to the National Cancer Institute's Clinical Trials Reporting Program (CTRP), and clinical trial financial management. A full-morning workshop was dedicated to strategies for implementing a clinical trial management system, or CTMS, across the research campus. A record crowd gathered to learn more about strategies for enterprise-wide rollouts for this third installment of the workshop.
"The popularity of the enterprise-wide rollout workshop indicates a growing interest on the part of large academic research institutions to leverage a single clinical research management system to manage their entire clinical trial portfolio," said Srini Kalluri, Founder, President, CEO, and Chief Customer Officer at Forte Research Systems, adding, "They are seeing the value in managing clinical trial activity across the entire institution, which supports GCP and provides improved efficiencies for all research groups."
Partnerships
Reflecting Forte's strategy to partner with other vendors in the industry to provide maximum functionality and cost efficiencies for their common customers, those partnerships took center stage during the conference. During a workshop dedicated to eIRB solutions and integration with the OnCore system, InfoEd Global and Topaz Technologies shared their eIRB platforms and plans for integration.
In follow up to an announcement of a partnership with Meade & Roach, LLP, at the last Onsemble conference, members of the consulting firm and its subsidiary, Aegis Compliance & Ethics Center, LLP, participated in a session dedicated to research billing compliance. In the session, new functionality for a Coverage Analysis module within the upcoming release of OnCore, version 12.0, was introduced and discussed.
"We enlisted the experts at Meade & Roach to work with us as we developed the new Coverage Analysis module," Kalluri said. "With the latest enhancements, the OnCore clinical research management system is now the best system available to assist institutions with their billing compliance strategies."
Forte made additional announcements regarding the upcoming release of version 12.0 during a session focused on technology updates to OnCore. Tony O'Hare, PhD, Co-Founder, Vice President of Engineering, and Chief Collaboration Officer at Forte, presented enhancements to reporting, effort tracking, external integration capabilities, and much more.
"Version 12.0 is the largest release in the history of the OnCore system," O'Hare said. "Attendees got an advance look at important new functionality, along with several enhancements for improved usability. The updates included in version 12.0 were very well received by attendees and have garnered excitement within the community."
The culmination of a record number of attendees, esteemed speakers and major technological enhancements to the OnCore system all resulted in one of the most successful conferences to date. "With the help of co-host UCSF, this conference has set the bar for the future of Onsemble conferences," Kalluri said. "It is an exciting step forward and the value will only continue to grow."
The next Onsemble Conference will take place September 5-7 in Madison, Wisconsin.
SOURCE Forte Research Systems