Easier, faster development of complex projects

Company developers working with Pervasive Data Integrator™ reported easier, faster development activities. They are able to bring on new client portals in a fraction of the time it took with their custom, non-automated integration.

Data reliability

The CRO has further improved the reliability and accuracy of critical trial data to customers.

Automated scheduling

Processes can be automated to run either at set time intervals or when defined event triggers occur, and clients are instantly notified of updates via email messages.

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Clinical trials for pharmaceutical, medical device companies require reliable data conversion

The company profiled in this case study is a world-leading contract research organization (CRO) that partners with pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers to bring new products to market. Their services speed the clinical trial stage of drug development by offering data capture and management systems that keep track of enrolled patients; organize trial results and facilitate communication between participating doctors and trial organizers. When the company needed a solution to conduct flat file to XML conversions from multiple applications in order to feed daily trial information to its clients, they looked to Pervasive Data Integrator™ to facilitate a highly reliable, automated data conversion solution.

Rapid data feeds sought

The company’s Clinical Trial Management System (CTMS) acts as a hub to manage the large amounts of diverse data involved with the operation of a clinical trial. The company discovered that the array of applications and sources involved each had distinct and incompatible data formats. This incompatibility was hurting efforts to rapidly gather and aggregate data feeds into clients’ portals to be checked against specific metrics.

Custom solution had become obsolete

Their custom solution had become obsolete. They needed automated data conversion to power the end-to-end process. Specifically, the company sought a way to convert flat files, CSV, Excel and other files to XML, aggregate XML feeds, conduct data sweeps of multiple databases, and combine and transfer the data to a back-end Oracle database to feed clients’ portals.

Pervasive Data Integrator brings data aggregation ability

Pervasive Data Integrator™ delivered powerful technology well-suited to meet the challenge. Using Pervasive Data Integrator, data is aggregated from multiple sources. Fed via CTMS, custom exports travel as files to customers. Currently the company aggregates data from 150-200 XML feeds per day with data from sweeps of 10-20 databases. Each XML file is typically 1-5 megabytes.

Batch processes scoop files from SFTP and FTP sites and drop them in a location that is monitored by a listener process. As soon as a file appears, the process invokes the Pervasive Integration Engine to process the data.

Pervasive passes a demanding threshold

There is no room for error when aggregating critical trial data, and time is of the essence. Pervasive Data Integrator™ passed a demanding threshold for acceptance by the CRO’s Manager of Applications Hosting and Operations. Access to all of the current data, and workflow organization to leverage that data, are keys to successful complex global clinical trials.

Pervasive FastTrack Training brings improvement ideas for workflow process

The company took part in an on-site Pervasive FastTrack Training™ session to learn about the many capabilities of the product. They learned a number of ways to further use Pervasive Data Integrator™. The company plans on using the many tools in Pervasive Data Integrator for further workflow process improvements and integration orchestration. Pervasive Process Designer, for example, will be used to link more multistep integration processes together in a single, automated integration task across message queues.