News

U Maryland School of Medicine Chooses Click Commerce for Financial Disclosures

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 06/16/09

The University of Maryland School of Medicine will use software from Click Commerce Research and Healthcare to automate financial disclosures required for all research within the institution. Beginning with researchers in the School of Medicine, the university intends to add all faculty and related leadership positions in subsequent phases to the eResearch Portal suite of software.

"With 1,600 protocols annually and multiple researchers associated with each protocol, we need to flag potential conflicts of interest long before they become a problem but without adding to the administrative burden on our researchers," said Susan Buskirk, executive director, institutional review board (IRB), and associate dean for the medical school. "The Click solution fully meets our goal to reduce turnaround times, improve accuracy, increase confidentiality, and streamline the creation and delivery of management plans. It also directly addresses one of the biggest complaints from our researchers by eliminating the redundant entry of information on multiple studies. The ability to easily integrate the new [conflict of interest] application with our existing Click IRB system further simplifies and streamlines the process, making financial disclosures an ongoing, 'real-time' activity rather than something that has to be specially planned for."

The new integrated system, which will eliminate much of the paperwork involved in disclosure work, provides a single point of entry for all financial disclosures and automates disclosures not only for individual researchers but also for institutional relationships that could create conflicts. Also, the application integrates both annual attestations and specific research project disclosures as they pass through the school's Click Commerce-based IRB system. Finally, the software streamlines creation of conflict of interest (management plans, which typically must be monitored on a periodic basis to ensure compliance.