Clinical trials are essential for evaluating the safety and efficacy of new medical treatments, drugs, or interventions, and they are a cornerstone of modern medicine. Vaccine development during COVID-19 demonstrated the importance of clinical trials in safeguarding global public health, which is why this particular field continues to be a multi-billion dollar industry and is expected to grow in the coming years.

Mass General Brigham (MGB) is one of the leading biomedical research organizations in the US and a principal teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. Its Insight Research Portal is used by more than 20,000 medical researchers across the industry to help facilitate the full clinical trial cycle. The portal covers every single aspect of the research process, including the selling of intellectual property (IP) and declarations to ensure compliance with numerous regulatory bodies.

MGB partnered with Proxet to simplify the Insight Portal and deliver a holistic full-cycle medical research solution.

The Insight Research Portal was developed to streamline all research processes — from research proposals to conflict of interest declarations — within a single system. This was achieved through various business modules that encompass fields such as agreements, human research, and biosafety. Each module requires its own business logic, and in some cases, is dependent on other modules, creating a complex ecosystem with intricate co-dependencies.

Further development and improvements were hindered by these interdependencies and user experience suffered as a result. MGB needed a well-designed back end to deliver an improved user experience, which was difficult at the time due to its legacy codebase.

Proxet’s partnership with MGB started with UI implementation — Proxet’s engineers implemented functional UI/UX to accommodate Insight’s complex enterprise business processes. Proxet then worked with MGB to propose new functionalities to accommodate their growing needs. With the new requirements in mind,  Proxet’s engineers developed a new back end from scratch and rewrote the legacy APIs, resolving many of the issues present in the legacy system. Gradually, the platform transitioned away from a bulky system with better flexibility and scalability.

During the early stages of Proxet and MGB’s partnership, it was discovered that a waterfall approach led to protracted release cycles, and Proxet introduced various engineering practices to better scale the product. Proxet’s engineering team introduced continuous integration and delivery processes which led to more efficient and effective development cycles and improved quality — all while maintaining strict regulatory compliance. “Proxet has been a strong partner in leading the development of the software using best practices while adhering to rigorous compliance requirements,” said Scott McNeal, Vice President of Innovation Operations and Analytics at MGB.

Proxet also introduced automation testing to the development process as each release requireds a huge amount of testing, and it is necessary to ensure the quality of deliverables. This enabled shorter release cycles, reducing unnecessary costs due to stymied development and further improved the efficiency of the development process.

With the help of Proxet’s engineers, Insight migrated from on-prem servers to cloud solutions. This was a significant milestone in Insight’s transformation, as the platform no longer required a dedicated team for physical on-prem server maintenance. This freed up valuable resources while increasing flexibility for future deployments.

As part of the migration process, Proxet’s engineers also improved and redesigned legacy functionalities that were incompatible with cloud solutions. With ensured stability from the cloud vendors, the ultimate result is a more robust system with less maintenance, paving the way for Insight’s growing success.

“Their ability to innovate, provide technical expertise, understand the business challenges, and their level of commitment and desire to exceed the client’s expectations makes Proxet a great partner for our organization.”

The transformation of the Insight Portal is a noticeable one — pages that once required more than 20 seconds to load now load in one to two seconds.

Proxet also established operation and management teams for MGB that provide close to 24/7 support to the platform. With more than 150,000 thousand active users (including administrative personnel) worldwide and 1.6 million unique sessions in 2022, it is sufficient to say that Insight is now one of the finest medical research portals available in the market, and Proxet is proud to be part of Insight’s continuing success.

Regarding MGB’s partnership with Proxet, McNeal has this to say: “Their ability to innovate, provide technical expertise, understand the business challenges, level of commitment and desire to exceed the client’s expectations makes Proxet a great partner for our organization.”

Contact Proxet today to discover what transformational changes await your business.