Summary

The ClinSpark product team is excited to announce the second release of 2023 - version 23.2.

The release contains performance improvements along with enhancements to samples processing and study site management.  It also contains security enhancements. We feel this release will be of benefit to all of our early phase customers. In this blog post, we wanted to share a few highlights.

Samples Processing

Sample pathway designs enforce that a container step is the last step before a processing workflow is considered finished.  Completing a container step normally moves samples off the processing dashboard to be continued elsewhere.  However, through early phase customer feedback we’ve learned that there are a number of pathway workflows & designs where enforcing this way to ‘end’ active processing may not always be desired. This can cause samples to remain ‘open’ indefinitely within the processing dashboard, and users must work around them, or possibly run into other downstream challenges.

Open

An example of samples left ‘open’ on the dashboard for a long period of time, which may be appropriate for certain samples and/or pathways.

Longer term our goal is still to revisit some of the underlying pathway design conventions to allow more flexibility in designs that won’t always enforce the last step being a container step. For now, we've added some new capabilities into current design conventions which can allow samples in certain steps to become ‘hidden’ from dashboard views. 

Open

New configuration option in Samples > Configure > Update Sample Path Step

A new (and optional) step configuration can be utilized on any current or new pathway design. This will allow customers to evaluate it’s capabilities, and opt-in to using it as needed.

We hope this is useful for study teams in order to introduce more flexibility into their designs. Certain samples that have not yet fully completed their pathways can be temporarily removed from active processing views, but still accessed and managed with a filter.

By default, this filter will be set to still show all the samples where the ‘hidden’ flag is not set on the current pathway step. This will ensure that the current user experience of the Samples > Dashboard component is not interrupted and maintained with current pathway designs customers are familiar with. However, the new visibility filter can be used to exclusively bring ‘hidden’ samples into view on the dashboard, if the current sample step is configured to hide it.

We look forward to hearing what our customers think about this feature, and continue to learn more about the ways we can improve upon samples processing capabilities.

Performance Enhancements

Two functional areas received performance enhancements: lab data reviews and bulk SMS.

Lab Reviews

Through customer feedback, we observed scenarios that would result in a longer than expected response time for lab data review actions. This meant that under certain conditions, users would need to spend more time performing lab data reviews than what was was desirable. We’ve taken a new approach on how this review function is implemented, resulting in quicker response times for test and panel level reviews.

The functionality remains the same as before, but now with a much more desirable user experience.

SMS

We also observed certain scenarios that would result in a long period of time for bulk SMS actions to complete. This sometimes contributed to performance degradation of the system as well, resulting in less than desirable application user experience. There may be operational burdens place on study recruitment teams to use workarounds in sending bulk SMS messages when this occurs.

Going forward now, bulk SMS capabilities have been refactored and optimized for an improved performance, and reducing the need for workarounds. Our goal with these sorts of changes are to keep existing the functionality the same, but with a much quicker response time and optimal user experience.

Study Site Validation

A rather small but impactful change this release was improved logic on study-site configurations, which are managed per study in the Study > Configure component.

The system will now check to see if there are calendar appointments associated to a given study site, and prevent site removal if there are. While rare, it can pose a problem if study site deletion occurs after certain recruitment activities have been started. Any accidental deletion of study sites is now further mitigated.

Looking ahead

There are a few other changes in the release related to security improvements, detailed in the technical file release notes. The complete technical file will be available to registered users of our service desk portal.

We look forward to sharing additional changes on this documentation site soon.

Much of this release was made possible through the ongoing and collaborative feedback we receive from our early phase customers. Listening to feedback and understanding the needs of users is of crucial importance to our development team. We look forward to these opportunities.

We will continue to strive for providing effective solutions through a continuously improving product.