ProjectFlow: a configurable workflow management application for point of care research

Rupali Dhond; Danne Elbers; Nilla Majahalme; Svitlana Dipietro; Sergey Goryachev; Ryan Acher; Sarah Leatherman; Tori Anglin-Foote; Qingzhu Liu; Shaoyu Su; Ramana Seerapu; Robert Hall; Ryan Ferguson; Mary T Brophy; Jeff Ferraro; Scott L DuVall; Nhan V Do

doi:10.1093/jamiaopen/ooab074

ProjectFlow: a configurable workflow management application for point of care research

JAMIA Open. 2021 Sep 2;4(3):ooab074. doi: 10.1093/jamiaopen/ooab074. eCollection 2021 Jul.

Authors

Rupali Dhond¹, Danne Elbers¹, Nilla Majahalme¹, Svitlana Dipietro¹, Sergey Goryachev¹, Ryan Acher¹, Sarah Leatherman¹, Tori Anglin-Foote², Qingzhu Liu², Shaoyu Su², Ramana Seerapu², Robert Hall¹, Ryan Ferguson¹, Mary T Brophy¹, Jeff Ferraro², Scott L DuVall², Nhan V Do¹

Affiliations

¹ VA Boston Healthcare System, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
² VA Salt Lake City Healthcare System, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.

Abstract

Objective: To best meet our point-of-care research (POC-R) needs, we developed ProjectFlow, a configurable, clinical research workflow management application. In this article, we describe ProjectFlow and how it is used to manage study processes for the Diuretic Comparison Project (DCP) and the Research Precision Oncology Program (RePOP).

Materials and methods: The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is the largest integrated health care system in the United States. ProjectFlow is a flexible web-based workflow management tool specifically created to facilitate conduct of our clinical research initiatives within the VHA. The application was developed using the Grails web framework and allows researchers to create custom workflows using Business Process Model and Notation.

Results: As of January 2021, ProjectFlow has facilitated management of study recruitment, enrollment, randomization, and drug orders for over 10 000 patients for the DCP clinical trial. It has also helped us evaluate over 3800 patients for recruitment and enroll over 370 of them into RePOP for use in data sharing partnerships and predictive analytics aimed at optimizing cancer treatment in the VHA.

Discussion: The POC-R study design embeds research processes within day-to-day clinical care and leverages longitudinal electronic health record (EHR) data for study recruitment, monitoring, and outcome reporting. Software that allows flexibility in study workflow creation and integrates with enterprise EHR systems is critical to the success of POC-R.

Conclusions: We developed a flexible web-based informatics solution called ProjectFlow that supports custom research workflow configuration and has ability to integrate data from existing VHA EHR systems.

Keywords: clinical trial; data sharing; diuretic; embedded pragmatic; learning healthcare; precision oncology; randomization; veterans.

Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association 2021. This work is written by US Government employees and is in the public domain in the US.