UNI Saves Essential Time With Cayuse

Challenge

The University of Northern Iowa’s Office of Sponsored Programs keeps very busy, with a lean staff overseeing over 300 protocol submissions every year. While the rate of submissions had been relatively stable year-over-year, the increasing administrative demand of sponsored research strained the office’s staff and existing manual management processes.

“The biggest issue that we were facing,” recalls Tolif Hunt, Director of the Office of Sponsored Programs at UNI for over 8 years, “was that we were facing a really slow, bureaucratic, and paper-heavy system.” This meant that every email communication and paper document that went through the office had to be saved and filed away as a PDF, creating a significant administrative burden for staff assigned to manage this information and slowing down crucial submissions and approvals.

“It was just very administratively cumbersome to save every single communication,” Lisa Ahern, UNI Office of Sponsored Programs Associate Director and IRB Administrator, adds. “Whenever you had a PI reach out to you about a study, you had to take the time to go through the filing system and find the right file number.”

Staff at the Office of Sponsored Programs often served as the sole stewards of grant information, including official agreements, budget report templates, and more. However, file management was difficult without a centralized system of record, with duplicate files and version tracking requiring careful oversight. 

There was also a lack of transparency across submissions, as only draft authors could see their submissions without actively responding to share requests from stakeholders like department heads, project teammates, PIs, and co-PIs.

Solution

Faced with the limitations of a manual management system, the Office of Sponsored Programs needed to find a better way to allocate assisting staff who were preoccupied by tasks related to manual filing.

Without additional resources from the university, this meant a more streamlined grants management system that would allow existing staff to spend less time filing and more time focusing on essential tasks for keeping submissions moving.

After weighing different vendor options, UNI implemented Cayuse Human Ethics for IRB protocol management, followed by Cayuse Sponsored Projects for sponsored research management.  

Results

With Human Ethics and eventually Sponsored Projects in place, the Office of Sponsored Programs saw significant improvements across grant and protocol management processes. 

According to Tolif, “One of the biggest things that we have gained since onboarding Sponsored Projects is access to information. Now everyone knows where the official documentation is. It’s in Cayuse and everyone can go in and get it at any time. Letting our faculty and staff administer the projects along with us instead of just following behind us has been a huge help.”

Lisa agrees that increased transparency is one of the biggest benefits of implementing Cayuse. “Investigators aren’t always saving their own consent forms or their own protocols or versions of modifications, so they would be asking us to dig up that information for them, but now we can just point them back to Cayuse to show them where they can find all of that on their own in their dashboard.” For example, “if you have a full board protocol that you’re working on, you can see other reviews or comments on the review team.”

Lisa also highlights the significant time savings that resulted from implementing Human Ethics. “On the IRB side,” she adds, “we had one other person outside of myself who was saving and tracking information, but we’ve recaptured the staff time for that person to direct it to other activities, which has been really important.”

The team estimates Cayuse has helped reduce the time spent on administrative tasks by half and covers “50% of the workload of one staff member,” who previously spent the majority of their time managing paper and electronic files and communications. This provided an immediate return on investment, allowing staff to focus on essential tasks instead of chasing paperwork. 

The solutions also reduced administrative burden for UNI’s IT team, thanks to the software’s ease-of-use, configurability, and customer support. For example, Tolif recalls, “If we wanted a form updated, we would have had to contact IT and put in a ticket, you know, and it would just take us forever. Now we see something that we want changed on a question, we go and change it; we want something rearranged on one of the forms; we go in and change it.”

Communications have also improved thanks to Cayuse’s workflow features, with automatic email notifications alerting approvers and other teams when action is required and providing a link to complete the task directly in Cayuse. 

Finally, staff at UNI appreciate the support they’ve received from Cayuse. “Your team is always very friendly and very responsive,” Lisa notes, “we can always reach out and know that someone will help us out through something that is important; Cayuse continues to do that.”