Patient data generated during clinical research is growing at an exponential rate with little infrastructure to manage, exchange and analyze these data. At the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, laboratory researchers were forced to document, collect, sort, and analyze data using common office productivity products such as Microsoft Excel. These products required researchers to manually format, import, or re-enter data to separate packages; write custom functions to manipulate the data; and create custom reports to share the data. The alternative was for IT staff to build and support a new custom solution, a costly process that took a significant amount of up front development and continual support time.

FHCRC needed an informatics platform that accelerated solution development, while providing researchers with a simple, yet flexible, interface that integrates easily into their current workflow. Specifically, FHCRC challenges were to:

The company's key purchase decision factors were design speed, workflow integration, database query capabilities, product extensibility, and overall usability.

TERANODE Design Suite was brought in May 2004 as a design automation platform for both the IT professional and research teams. The product provides a common, visual interface for designing, annotating and documenting clinical sample processes at Fred Hutchinson, including cell isolation, genetic analysis, serum testing, and tissue preparation. This clinical sample management solution consists of the TERANODE Design Suite and the TERANODE Model Server running on a Microsoft SQL Server.

Training, development and deployment times of the TERANODE solution at FHCRC took only a few weeks. IT professionals were trained in protocol design and user support for 3 hours, database support for 8 hours, and extension building for 8 hours. Researchers were trained on the TERANODE Design Suite use in the lab for 3 hours.