Less Inventory Waste, More Time: A Poster Presentation with UPMC Hillman Cancer Center
During the final week of June 2023, Slope attended the Association for American Cancer Institutes (AACI) Clinical Research Innovation conference in Chicago, IL. As part of that event, we debuted a research poster created in conjunction with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Hillman Cancer Center. UPMC Hillman is one of only three NCI-designated comprehensive cancer centers in the entire state of Pennsylvania.
Over the course of their analysis, UPMC Hillman Cancer Center demonstrated a significant reduction in both 1) waste and 2) time spent managing their clinical inventory, using data from Slope.
Follow along below for a post-presentation recap with Jamie Voyten, Clinical Research Laboratory Manager at UPMC Hillman and poster author.
Before we dive into the poster presentation, can you share how long UPMC Hillman Cancer Center has been using Slope, and how did your organization originally hear about us?
We received an email through ACRP in 2018, about two years after I started with the department. We decided to implement Slope in a few disease centers as a pilot and, coincidentally, we have been using it ever since.
Did it take a lot of convincing for your other managers to see that Slope could be better than what you currently had?
In the beginning, we hadn't seen anything like Slope before. However, once we saw what it could do it was an easy decision to give it a try. Now, having used Slope for so long, it is hard to imagine our trials without it.
Tell me about the scope of the poster project. What did you want to learn going into it?
We wanted to learn exactly how Slope was going to benefit our disease teams. We’re a data-driven organization, so to standardize our processes, I wanted to first see the data. Will this work in phase one studies with a lot of kits versus phase three studies using minimal kits, and how can we use it while being cognizant of staff turnover?
What we've found, especially over more recent clinical trials that we've been opening, is that the kits are becoming more complicated. Not only that, both sponsors & CROs want more comprehensive laboratory kit inventory records. They’re asking for it at visits and are requesting a greater volume of documentation than ever before. So, creating consistent documentation across all of our disease centers was really important.
Can you speak to the kit inventory strategy that UPMC Hillman had before Slope?
Everyone had their own way of managing inventory. Some people used Excel sheets, while others simply kept inventory around their desk, or shoved kits in a corner, accessing them as needed. We saw some of our people with no inventory system at all, so they didn't know what they had. It was a bit chaotic.
Meanwhile, the sponsors just kept sending more, and more, and more. Things just kept getting stashed away and pulled as you needed them.
When you're saying “stashed away,” how much space do you actually have to store your kits?
Not a lot. We were storing some supplies (such as shippers) on the loading dock, and other components in multiple buildings just to maintain the kits for when a patient would come in.
Tell me about the results you found after analyzing Slope data, and other trends you discovered from this poster project.
One of the big trends we saw was that our people actually knew what they had now. They stopped ordering so many kits, and we saw more communication amongst the teams in terms of where these kits lived.
If a study got transferred from one research associate to another, it became an easy move. If someone was out sick or working from home, there was no waiting for someone to get back to you — which is especially important if it's an end-of-treatment kit or a screening kit. We were just able to go into the system, grab it, and move on.
Now that we're about 10 months out from when we started this initiative, the results have been pretty dramatic. In the two centers where we conducted our research, we initially only knew where approximately 33-50% of our unexpired supplies were located. Now, those numbers have shifted to 93% of clinical inventory both being accounted for and not expired in one center, while the other center has 100% of their supplies in that optimal category. The rest of the department is trending in a similar fashion.
In a similar vein, Slope helps us manage excess inventory sent by sponsors, by mapping where it lives and how it travels through our center.
Did you ever contact a sponsor and say, “You're sending us too many supplies, and we have the data to prove it?”
Yes. We were able to shut off the automatic resupply process with a few studies. We also could do budget negotiations because we now have that data to say, “You are occupying our staff’s time because your kits are not logistically appropriate for what we need.”
We also were able to reduce waste in general by not having to constantly order more supplies, because we didn’t know if we had it already.
Is there feedback from other members of your team using Slope that you want to share?
The majority of my staff like it because it eliminates a burden on their end. They don't have to keep track of when things are going to expire. Slope does it for them. So, even if a user is checking Slope once a week, they’re going to see all of those alerts. They’re going to know when things are coming up. They’re going to be able to look at their inventory if they have a lot of patients coming in, and they’re able to plan ahead.
I like the “autopilot” aspect of Slope. As a busy researcher, it’s nice to know that inventory is one less thing you have to really worry about on the forefront of your mind.
You're also able to look at trends more easily. If multiple studies have patients coming off and on, or a lot of lab manual amendments are coming out and the sponsor is adjusting the kits, you have all that data at your fingertips. You’re then able to have better conversations with people who might be running the study externally, or even internally.
As a former coordinator, I understand the power of using data to identify trends and have more productive conversations, like you had mentioned. So that we're not all working in silos on our individual studies, and we're not spending a lot of time trying to manually aggregate all of this data ourselves. Do you agree?
Yes, exactly. Instead of each disease team operating in its own bubble, UPMC Hillman Clinical Research Services (CRS) takes an “us” approach. We are a large team, and not all disease groups are the same. That being said, you can have the same process across an organization to make operations a bit more streamlined.
If a site out there is on the fence about using Slope, what would you say to them?
I would recommend trying it. Gather staff feedback. Do your own time test like we did. See how it's benefiting them, and give it at least 30 days to evaluate. Check out how your data looks and how your kits are moving throughout your system, and then make your decision from there.
Thank you [and Mary Horak, co-author of the poster] so much for your hard work!
I had an outpouring of support from CRS leadership to keep this initiative moving, and I want to thank them for always allowing an out-of-the-box discovery-based approach. I also want to give a big shout out to Julie Urban, who is also on the poster. Her phase one center was our main test center. She helped her team take inventory management — something that felt impossible to wrangle — and made order out of chaos, just by utilizing Slope!
