My ShareFEST case study of the day today was BioClinica‘s Peter Benton’s presentation discussing the success that BioClinica has seen with SharePoint as an enabling platform for next-generation clinical solutions. Peter began his presentation with a recognition that, pre-SharePoint, the problem was that “there’s too much work and we don’t have modern tools to manage it.”

Peter’s analogy of choice was that commonplace desktop accessory of yore, the in basket. As Peter observed, in today’s electronic workspace, instead of a single in basket, we have multiple ones, and they take many forms. And as a result of not having that single in basket to quickly gauge one’s outstanding workload, “people walk into and out of the office every day not knowing everything that’s on their plate.” Peter feels this is because, “you can’t manage what you can’t see,” and we can’t “see” so much of our work today because, being digital, it’s invisible.

Peter explained that in a pharma firm, it’s especially important to control these processes (clinical processes), and that variability in the performance of processes needs to be eliminated, new processes need to be measured, and processes need to be customer-facing and collaborative. In other words, to be successful in today’s clinical workplace, a company needs one process, one system, one to-do list, and, as Peter testified, “I believe the answer is SharePoint, [and] more importantly, workflow.” As an evangelist, Peter certainly has the lingo down, outright proclaiming, “I’m passionate [about SharePoint] … I’ve got the religion.”

Peter provided several examples of how BioClinica is using SharePoint, and especially its native workflow functionality, internally. Examples shown included: using NextDocs‘ SharePoint solution in their product development process; defining, assessing, and tracking product development work lists (essentially requirements management); test case and results administration; burn-down charts; study team sites; investigator portals; and executive dashboards. As well, returning to his in basket analogy, Peter noted that today, “Outlook is my inbox … and it works with SharePoint.”

In the final remarks of his formal presentation before opening it up for questions, Peter’s closing statement was, “We want to be able to serve the data up to our customers and [by continuing to use SharePoint], we believe we’ll be able to make significant advances in how fast we do our work and deliver our services to our customers.”

Bamboo Nation has ShareFEST covered:

• Greetings from the ShareFEST Conference! Keynote Speaker Steve Aylward of Microsoft on ‘The SharePoint Buzz in Health and Life Sciences’
• ShareFEST – Matt Walz Provides a ‘Trip Around the Industry: How SharePoint is Being Used Today in Life Sciences’
• ‘Collaborating in 3-D: Merck’s Virtual Meeting Space for Scientific Collaboration’
• Building a SharePoint Center of Excellence at Shire
• ‘SharePoint Starts the Fire’ at the Combination SharePint & Live Webcast Q&A with Dux Raymond Sy & Michael Gannotti
• Michael Gannotti Shares ‘Mikey’s Top 5’ SharePoint 2010 Features
• ‘SharePoint as an Enabling Platform for Next Generation Clinical Solutions at BioClinica’
• ShareFEST – Dux Raymond Sy’s ‘Don’t Curb Their Enthusiasm: Navigating the Shift from Local Applications to SharePoint as an Enterprise Platform’