The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) is a world-leading centre for research and postgraduate education in public and global health. It handles around 800 ethics applications every year – one third from staff and PhDs and two-thirds from MSc students. With staff and students based across 180 countries with variable IT infrastructure, these researchers find themselves cut off from the approval process.
The existing system for handling ethics approvals had several problems. Data was stored in multiple locations and the basis of the workflow was Word documents distributed by email. It was difficult to have an overview, achieve consistency and ensure the process was secure.
Infonetica needed to provide a solution that allowed for easy generation of documents, straightforward monitoring, a unified storage system, full customisation and easy access to all users – no matter where they are in the world.
Using Ethics RM, Infonetica created customised workflows which gave LSHTM the ability to fast-track amendments to go directly to the Chair instead of the Committee.
Ethics RM now automatically generates standard letters and notifications which can easily be managed in-house. Users also value the ability to send applications to particular committees automatically, depending on the answers to key questions in the application form.
Ethics RM is popular with administrative staff and committee members alike. The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine is now keen to start using some of the more advanced features, such as its sophisticated report generation tools.
“With Ethics RM, we’ve been able to streamline processes, improve workflows and send out notifications and letters automatically, based on application status. As a result, the administration load has reduced greatly.”