Company: WCG Clinical Endpoint Solutions
Company background: WCG is built upon a 50-year legacy of ethical review, growing to what is today a suite of clinical services and technologies that maximize speed and efficiency for those who perform clinical trials.
Contact: Kriss Harris
Title: Senior Programmer
Country: United Arab Emirates
Award Category: Innovative Problem Solver
Tell us about the business problem you were trying to solve?
To create the QS data transfer for clients, we rely on Mapping Specifications. These specs provide instructions on variable names, attributes, and forms to be included in the transfer. However, the manual creation of these specs increases the chances of errors, potentially impacting the QS transfer.
How did you use SAS to solve that business problem? What products did you use and how did you use them?
SAS automated the creation of mapping specifications. By requesting form names and version numbers, a Macro extracted the relevant forms from a validated list. Using Visual Basic with SAS, the Macro then generated the Excel Mapping Specs. The automated specs reduced the chances of any errors.
What were the results or outcomes?
The automated mapping specs reduced the data manager's workload from around 40 hours to just a few hours per study. In addition, there was less back-and-forth communication between the programmer and data manager, as the specs were more accurate which help both parties.
Why is this approach innovative?
This approach is innovative because it changed how WCG previously conducted their data transfer operations for years. The introduction of the mapping library and the creation of automated mapping specs streamlined and improved the process of creating data transfers, making it more efficient.
