Nationwide Children’s Hospital Saves 4 Hours a Week on Technology Transfer

Challenge

Nationwide Children’s Hospital is one of the largest children’s hospitals and research institutions in the United States, with operations dating back over 100 years. As one of the world’s largest free-standing pediatric research institutions, Nationwide Children’s Hospital is dedicated to the continued growth of its care and research capacity, with over $3 billion in new construction currently underway.

A worldwide leader in pediatric healthcare, Nationwide Children’s Hospital covers several fields of research and specialization. Its Research Institute has had notable success developing and commercializing gene therapy solutions and is responsible for releasing several clinically available therapeutics. This enabled the expansion of several specialty areas, including behavioral healthcare, to better serve the hospital’s patients, staff, and community. 

With these successes helping to drive the hospital’s continued growth, it was essential that the Office of Technology Commercialization’s management solutions could not only quickly and effectively facilitate the tech transfer process, but also keep up with higher workloads, bigger projects, and new developments in finances, patents, technology, and marketing.

“We had been using other enterprise solutions to manage the variety of things that the tech transfer office has to in order to be effective,” recalled Andrew Corris, a Senior Licensing Associate in Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s Office of Technology Commercialization, but “as we got bigger, the things that we were able to deal with just became inefficiencies.” For example, a 10-second delay for a page to load went from an annoyance to a severe limitation as the volume of projects increased. 

Issues with the current enterprise solutions also reached beyond the Office of Technology Commercialization. Due to an over-reliance on emails for correspondence and record keeping between multiple offices, agreements took too long to complete, and faculty could not rely on a single source of truth with records inconsistently and often incorrectly entered via email. 

Above all else, the previous management solution was not reliable enough to meet the institution’s needs. From periodic outages to a lack of integration capabilities or even a single sign-on for users, “we had always had a base level of unhappiness with that previous system, but we didn’t really feel like there was an alternative that would meet all of our needs.”

Solution

With the limitations of their current management solutions becoming more apparent as project volumes increased, administrators at Nationwide Children’s Hospital sought a new solution that would be able to grow with the institution and better facilitate the tech transfer process instead of creating obstacles. 

There were several requirements that a new research management solution would need to meet to justify the perceived risk of adopting and implementing a new system. It needed to be reliable, accessible, easy to use, and easy to adopt, but it also needed to be flexible enough to work with the particularities of existing, institution-specific systems. It needed to be a single source of truth that could accurately house information while reducing the hassles of entering information in the first place. Most importantly, it needed to expedite processes and reduce administrative burden across the board, freeing faculty to focus on the work that matters most.

“We wanted to be able to give our investigators, faculty, and staff the ability to log on to the system quickly and see where their agreements are,” Andrew noted, “how many agreements they have; their distributions; their technologies; everything that is associated with them.”

After investigating several options, it was clear that Cayuse Inventions best met Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s specific needs. From a user-experience perspective, Cayuse provided the single sign-on user access and transparency faculty needed in a responsive, user-friendly package. Additionally, Cayuse Inventions was flexible enough to integrate with the hospital’s current systems and securely provide access to reliable information from anywhere, at any time. 

While some staff members were concerned about the time and effort needed to implement a new system, Cayuse’s purposeful and efficient implementation process put these worries to rest. Historical data was migrated from the old system in just a weekend without any data loss, and the consistent support from Cayuse’s knowledgeable implementation team ensured that the rest of the implementation, including training, proceeded smoothly. 

“I’ve met with everyone on the Cayuse team who deals with us,” Andrew commented, “All of them are people of high integrity and have a genuine passion in trying to help us do this. A lot of them come from tech transfer or understand it pretty implicitly, so it’s worth your time.”

“If nothing else,” he added, “Cayuse is a primary player in the market with offerings that are unique, so it’s worth it.”

Results

With Cayuse Inventions fully implemented, Nationwide Children’s Hospital faculty quickly began seeing results and improvements over their previous tech transfer management system. 

Thanks to Invention’s secure single sign-on and transparency into any project’s lifecycle through the task’s functionality, teams are now able to easily identify and resolve bottlenecks. They can also quickly update stakeholders on the status of current projects, and provide leadership with a more accurate summary of roles, responsibilities, and time spent on tasks. This has not only been beneficial for actively promoting accountability; it also gave the Office of Technology Commercialization the data needed to expand hiring where needed.

The cutback in manual data entry and email correspondence has also freed up more time for staff to focus on important tasks. Where agreements teams previously needed to spend significant time in meetings and sending emails, they can now simply log in to Cayuse to accomplish the same results in less time. 

“One thing that we struggled with coming out of the pandemic – as a lot of offices did –  was a lack of engagement with invention disclosures and other higher-order commercialization activities because they’re administratively burdensome,” Andrew noted. But once Inventions’ automated reminders and one-click disclosures and form fills were implemented, engagement and completion rates improved noticeably, as did the accuracy of completed forms. 

“That’s not something that was a primary endpoint for doing this,” Andrew continued, “but it was incredibly helpful to have it on board whenever we didn’t know that we were needed.”

Finally, the switch to Cayuse also improved employee satisfaction among principal investigators, who had raised complaints about the previous system’s unresponsiveness. “It showed that we cared about their needs,” Andrew recalled of many PIs’ reactions. 

Overall, Nationwide Children’s Hospital faculty are satisfied with the change to Cayuse. “We were able to make the changes that we have been wanting to make for a long time,” Andrew concluded. “It’s worth your time and effort to investigate this as a potential for your organization.”