6 Ways to Mitigate Risk, Cost, and Time When Migrating to a Modern CTMS

A thorough assessment of your current CTMS is the foundation for a successful migration—and, indeed, the first step we suggest. It’s an excellent time to gather your team and listen to their feedback, opening the floor to your system’s ground users.

Begin by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your existing system. Analyze its current functionality, workflow integration, and limitations. The goal is to build a full picture of how the system is being used and where improvements are needed. This is where your team comes in. IT will have different needs than finance, for example, and clinical operatives are in a category of their own.

One way to organize your thoughts is to perform a SWOT analysis. This results in a clear document that categorizes four areas of assessment: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. A slight modification to the usual program? Instead of only assessing your CTMS as a customer-facing tool, you’re prioritizing your team as a core user base.

A full understanding of your legacy system’s current gaps and opportunities will help you decide what’s most important in your new CTMS. This reduces the risk of purchasing features or services that aren’t necessary, or overlooking key components. Having a clear plan helps avoid overspending and cuts down on the time that would have been spent customizing irrelevant aspects of the new tool.

Once you’ve assessed your current CTMS, it’s time to create a detailed migration plan. This plan should outline every aspect of the migration process and help everyone involved understand their roles and responsibilities. 

Start by defining clear timelines, establishing when key milestones need to be met, and specifying specific deliverables at each phase. Each step should be accompanied by migration metrics for success so you can monitor progress and address any issues early. SMART goals aren’t just for employees! 

It’s also important to anticipate potential challenges that could disrupt the process. There are a couple common risks in CTMS migrations, including data compatibility issues, system downtime, and unplanned costs. Having a well laid-out contingency plan in place for each identified challenge mitigates these risks. Your plans should outline clear actions to take if something goes wrong so the project team can respond quickly and minimize disruptions.

Keep in mind that the overarching goal of the pre-planning stage is to reduce the likelihood of misunderstandings or delays. To this end, your team will need clear communication channels across all teams involved in the migration. This includes IT, clinical operations, project managers, and system users. Everyone needs to remain informed and aligned on the legacy to modern system migration process and its progress. Create a schedule of regular updates, status reports, and meetings to keep everyone on the same page. 

By the time you’re ready to begin, you should have a  well-defined migration roadmap. It should include everything from the basics to fully-detailed contingency plans, making it easier to stick to the budget and meet deadlines. The clearer and more detailed the plan, the less likely you are to encounter costly overruns or scope creep. This keeps everything (and everyone) on track.

Data is one of the most critical assets in clinical trials, and mishandling it can have serious consequences. Before migration begins, make sure you have a strategy for cleaning and mapping your data. This includes identifying outdated, incomplete, or irrelevant information that needs to be removed or corrected. By doing this before your CTMS migration, you’ll significantly reduce the risk of introducing errors into the new system.

Data mapping is the process of aligning the fields and formats in your legacy CTMS with those in the new system. This step is critical for making sure that your data remains accurate and functional after the migration. Failure to do so can result in misplaced or misinterpreted information, which can disrupt clinical workflows and lead to costly errors. 

To minimize these risks, conduct multiple test runs of the migration process to confirm that your data has been properly transferred and functions as expected in the new environment. You can’t be too careful, especially when it comes to transferring secure or protected data from one system to another.

No matter how well-designed your new CTMS is, its success depends on your team’s ability to use it effectively. A common mistake during system migration is underestimating the amount of training required, regardless of how easy to learn it is. Start training key system users well before the actual migration. This gives them time to adapt to new workflows and prevents a loss of productivity once the system goes live. The goal in training is to allow the system’s users to “hit the ground running” with their new, modern CTMS.

An important aspect of this is tailoring training to the needs of different user groups. Clinical staff, IT personnel, and regulatory teams may all use the system in different ways. This makes it important to provide role-specific guidance. There will also be differences in the amount of time it takes to train CTMS users, depending on how often and in-depth their use will be. Be sure to properly plan each stage of training for different user groups in your migration roadmap. 

By giving users the knowledge they need in advance, you can reduce the time spent troubleshooting issues after the system is implemented. This early investment in training not only lowers the risk of costly downtime but also helps avoid frustration among your team members. Preparation is the key to success and a well-trained user is a confident user.

The data’s in: the BSI CTMS supports organizations from CROs to Academics in a way that no other CTMS on the market can. Our modern CTMS solutions cover all aspects of your clinical trials. 

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