Eastern Michigan University Centralized COI and IRB Management with Cayuse

Challenge

At Eastern Michigan University, a regional public institution serving over 13,000 students, researchers across schools and programs take community engagement seriously. From clinically inclined, community-based participatory research, to local health and mental health initiatives, faculty, staff, and students across the university work to dovetail research with community engagement.

In order to better serve both the community and research teams, administrators at Eastern Michigan University sought better management strategies that would reduce administrative burden for faster turnaround times and improved accuracy. While the university made do with manual, paper-based systems and a single research management application, the inherent issues with the status quo became more apparent as the volume of research increased.

For one thing, while the existing electronic management platform leveraged fillable MS Word forms, these were not coded into the system and therefore contained more fields than applicants needed to complete. “The issue we were having was that as a downloadable fillable document, you can’t have branching logic,” recalled Sonia Chawla, Eastern Michigan University’s Assistant Vice President for Academic Research and Regulatory Compliance. “It was a problem of too much information: if you give us the information, we have to review it.” This put tremendous administrative burden on both researchers and the Institutional Review Board, all of whom had to spend more time manually completing and reviewing applications.

COI disclosures were even more complicated, reliant upon a paper-based system that was, in Sonia’s words, becoming “really unruly” to deal with. “It was not working – multiple people would eventually have to give me documents to sign and file, [but] my timeline wasn’t their timeline, and their timeline was not my timeline.” Additionally, the use of paper records complicated version management without a reliable method for tracking comments and changes, and also presented an extra security concern for sensitive information stored on-site.

The move to remote work also highlighted the urgent need for better management systems across campus. Sonia concluded in her reflection, “If you’re working on a paper-based system, it’s very burdensome. It’s even more burdensome to work remotely.”

Solution

While the previous management application and paper-based processes clearly weren’t helping to improve the research lifecycle, research administrators at Eastern Michigan University had already started exploring alternative options with the prior adoption of Cayuse Sponsored Projects for managing grant applications and certain compliance tasks. Ultimately, the university replaced its existing, non-Cayuse management application and paper management systems with Cayuse Human Ethics for IRB proposals and Outside Interests for compliance management.

As a public university, Eastern Michigan University usually avoids sole-sourcing vendors and service providers. However, the EMU community was already very pleased with Sponsored Projects’ management functionality and ease of use.

According to Sonia, “the reason we decided to sole source Cayuse was that we were already using it for sponsored projects and we wanted the integration – that’s why we switched over.” From an administrative perspective, the hope was that transitioning exclusively to the Cayuse platform would improve communications, the accuracy of centrally stored information, and user accessibility whether working on-campus or remotely.

Results

Overall, the university has seen notable administrative management improvements since adding Human Ethics and Outside Interests to its existing Sponsored Projects platform.

With the implementation of Cayuse’s single sign-on, users across departments and different stages of the research lifecycle have easy access to the information they need, whenever they need it, regardless of whether they’re working on-campus or fully remote. This easy access to the platform has enabled more effective version control for applications, increased transparency and accountability, faster turnaround times, easier reporting, and optimal security for sensitive information.

With a single sign-on and digital platform in place for all users, “It just made it a lot easier to have everything online, everybody can access the same thing,” Sonia noted, adding that tracking and documentation is not only essential for compliance: “It helps with accountability, too. Reviewers can read other reviewers’ comments; that just helps to hold everybody accountable.”

This transparency and accountability have also helped with communications between principal investigators, review boards, and all other stakeholders involved in a project, leading to improved application turnaround times. To cite one statistic, exempt reviews that used to take up to three weeks on average now take around four days, with some completed within 24 hours.

Reporting has also improved thanks to Cayuse’s smart forms and branching logic. “It’s very easy to generate reports,” Sonia observed after Cayuse’s implementation, adding, “The fact that I could put the reviewer form right in and they could see it next to the application, that’s really helpful.”

Finally, the centralized platform and single sign-on have helped to improve security, with all sensitive information now stored behind digital password protection instead of physically in an office.

While administrators at Eastern Michigan University will continue to re-assess their operating procedures and systems to improve efficiency as needed, they are currently pleased with everything Cayuse has done so far to reduce administrative burden and give time back to researchers and administrators to focus on the work that matters most.