Troy Walls, project manager in the UAMS Department of Information Technology

“UAMS has one of the first major success stories with the National Cancer Institute’s caBig initiative. Ultimately, the system will greatly lessen the amount of time that it takes to make our research findings available to other centers across the country,” said Troy Walls, project manager in the UAMS Department of Information Technology.

In 2007, Laura Hutchins, M.D., director of the UAMS Division of Hematology/Oncology, received a more than $120,000 grant for the UAMS Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute to participate in the cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG), a network for connecting cancer and biomedical researchers and physicians.

The network, which the National Cancer Institute (NCI) calls “a World Wide Web of cancer research,” was created in 2004. It links researchers nationally and internationally to better develop and share information about clinical trials and other work that could accelerate progress in cancer research and treatment.

Walls addressed about 300 members of NCI’s Clinical Trials Management Systems interest group during its Face-to-Face Meeting Sept. 8-9 in Memphis, Tenn. At the meeting, UAMS was recognized as a key contributor to the success of the Patient Study Calendar, one of caBig’s Web-based components used to manage patients enrolled in clinical trials. 

Other key contributors included the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California Los Angeles, the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University and the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center.

The UAMS Cancer Institute is the first cancer center in the country to have implemented a suite of eight software components — including five caBig components and three developed at UAMS — designed to handle data for clinical trials in an efficient format. The components developed at UAMS will be made available to other centers in the caBig community.

“We are farther along than anyone else, and we’ve done it with very little resources,” Walls said. “caBig is giving us the capability to capture research data online in real time rather than on paper and to make it available to other cancer centers so that we can better analyze our results.”

 “caBig’s components lessen the workload for the study nurse and anyone who is involved in data collection about the patients,” Walls said. “It has brought to light the capabilities of our system and how, with minor changes, we can make the processes more accurate and less time consuming.”

Walls called Hutchins a visionary in getting caBig implemented on the UAMS campus. “She saw the potential for improving our research systems and lowering the cost,” he said.

Walls said while it is going to take time to move all of the Cancer Institute’s clinical trials to the new system, he believes that any inconveniences in the front end will pay off in the long run.