Migrating To a Modern CTMS: A 6 Step Guide

Every successful migration starts with a clear, confirmed plan. At this point, your project lead should align all teams on timing, scope, and responsibilities. Every department, including clinical operations, data management, regulatory, and IT, needs to have their own timelines and deliverables. You should also finalize internal workflows for review, and prepare to approve migration steps as they happen. This keeps communication tight and reduces the risk of delays or surprises.

There’s an overlap between moving from your legacy CTMS to your new system. As such, it’s important to regularly back up your data throughout the process. Save the backups in at least two places, such as a secure cloud drive and an internal server. If anything goes wrong mid-migration, having access to a complete, time-stamped backup will save your team hours of work and prevent permanent data loss.

Even the most well-maintained CTMS platforms accumulate clutter. Remove outdated investigator profiles, abandoned studies, and incomplete contact records before migration begins. A clean system going in means a clean system going out! This way, your team won’t have to waste time fixing errors after go-live. 

Once data’s cleaned, make a clear plan for how each field from your legacy system will match the structure of the new one. If your old system uses different field names, dropdowns, or date formats, you’ll need to define how these will convert. 

This is a great time to include staff who’ve worked with your legacy CTMS on a daily basis. They often remember workarounds, unusual data habits, or notes saved in unexpected places: things an automated script might miss. 

With clean data and a finalized plan in place, the next step is configuring the new, modern CTMS to match your team’s needs. This means setting up user roles, study templates, standard workflows, and custom fields. Permissions should be as granular as needed, especially if your legacy system used outdated role structures. 

Now is the time to introduce features your team wanted before, but couldn’t implement due to platform limitations. 

It’s also vital to test all third-party system connections at this point. Does your CTMS share data with your EDC, external data visualization tools, financial tracking tool, or clinical trial document management system? If so, those integrations need to be fully functional before the first records are transferred. Your vendor can support this process, but your internal IT team should stay closely involved. This helps avoid surprises during the next phase of migration. 

Instead of migrating everything at once, start small. Begin with closed or inactive studies. These are less time-sensitive and give your team a safe space to test the process. Once the first batch is moved, carefully review the results. Every record needs to be accounted for. Files should open properly, audit trails should remain intact, and date fields should display correctly. 

If anything doesn’t match expectations, now’s the time to fix it. Addressing issues early on prevents them from cascading into larger problems. Only after you’ve confirmed the pilot group to be accurate should you move on to active studies. Continue reviewing each data set as it’s migrated to maintain accuracy throughout the process. 

This is also the time to make a final, complete backup of your legacy CTMS. This needs to include every study, attachment, user record, correspondence log, and audit trail. Lock out all users from accessing the system once it’s backed up.

It doesn’t matter how well-configured your system is, if your team doesn’t know how to use it they’ll be frustrated and details will fall through the cracks. Training needs to go beyond showing where things are—it should focus on how daily workflows are handled in the new platform. 

Study coordinators should know how to schedule monitoring visits. Regulatory staff should understand how to upload and manage documents. Managers should be confident in pulling reports. These are just three examples of how different team members should be comfortable with the system. Identify core goals for every department and make sure that all core users are able to not only manage, but maintain a steady workflow. 

Ongoing support is just as important as the training itself. Make sure your users know who to contact if they run into trouble. This might be an internal IT lead, your CTMS vendor, or both. The first few weeks after go-live are when most questions arise. Fast answers build trust in the new system. 

Once you’ve migrated all the data, trained all the users, and tested all the integrations, it’s time to go live. Choose a launch date that doesn’t overlap with audits or high priority study milestones. During the first week, keep a close eye on system performance. Encourage staff to report bugs or missing information immediately so you can respond quickly. 

After the first month, hold a formal review with stakeholders. Talk about what worked, what didn’t, and what adjustments you still need to make. This debrief will help close out the migration process and set your team up for future success. 

BSI CTMS is top of the line and we have the track record to prove it. Our modern CTMS solutions cover all aspects of your clinical trials and we want you to test them for your team!

BSI’s CTMS is the most innovative, function-complete, and easy-to-use clinical trial management software on the market. It provides CTMS, eTMF, Study Startup and Trial Supply Management in one integrated, unified platform.

Standard interfaces (API) assure complete data oversight and easy integration with the external systems (e.g. EDC and eTMF) of your choice. The BSI CTMS is the central hub for all aspects of your clinical trials. It’s available as SaaS for ease of use, continuous improvement, and simplified infrastructure.

We’re modern, sleek, and designed with the user in mind for intuitive end-to-end clinical trial management. And the best part? We offer updates, upgrades, and scalability in-house with a full client support team for your legacy system migration and beyond. 

There’s never been a better time to embrace a better CTMS. Book a call today!