Saving Time and Increasing Submissions at Chicago’s Mount Sinai Hospital

Challenge

Mount Sinai Hospital is a safety net level 1 trauma center in Chicago with 350 beds, treating low-income and unserved communities. Working with an entirely paper-based system, the Institutional Review Board at Mount Sinai faced significant challenges in staying organized and keeping forms and records up to date.

“We were particularly concerned about our consent forms for our annual renewals,” recalled Amanda Hong, Mount Sinai’s Institutional Review Board Coordinator. “We were having problems with maintaining the consent forms and keeping them organized and were unsure if our PIs were keeping up their research staff, given there was a lot of turnover.

“Also, because of our paperwork: sometimes our paperwork had to change every 2-3 years due to compliance changes. Sometimes our PIs weren’t keeping up with those policies and procedures, and sometimes they were getting confused by the new requirements.”

Solution

Mount Sinai implemented Cayuse Human Ethics in 2022 to help the hospital’s Institutional Review Board better organize and maintain their paperwork and records, and to save time for their PIs with smart forms and role-based dashboards.

“A lot of our Principal Investigators are providers or physicians in our institution here,” noted Amanda Hong, “who no longer have to worry about doing last-minute paperwork and handing it into us physically. They also do not have to worry about emailing back and forth with their research coordinators and printing out so much paperwork from their organization.”

Amanda added that Human Ethics also benefits the research coordinators, who “are even utilizing Cayuse and notice many differences, particularly with the modifications or the amendments, and they’re going much quicker in the process.”

Results

Since implementing Cayuse Human Ethics, Mount Sinai has seen notably improved submission processing times, increases in the number of submissions, and significant compliance improvements.

According to Amanda Hong, “Cayuse has changed a lot with our department. It has streamlined a lot of our processing and has organized our department. It has made our IRB institution more organized — no paper anymore— and has really ramped up our number of studies, and we would like to see that grow even more. Now more of our providers and residents, even more of our medical students, are becoming interested in doing research at our institution.”

She adds that thanks to Human Ethics’ easy-to-navigate dashboards and automated notifications, “more of our departments are being more compliant now. They’re even keeping up with a lot of their HIPPA training or Human Ethics training. They are also more aware of and keeping up with reporting their COIs.”