Cancer Trials Australia (CTA) works closely with member hospitals across the country, taking responsibility for the financial and regulatory administration of the hospitals' cancer clinical trials.
Currently CTA manages over 700 clinical trials nationally. MYOB Advanced Business has streamlined its financial administration, improved its data transparency and reduced manual tasks to set the stage for further growth.
Complexity at scale
Cancer Trials Australia facilitates the administration of clinical trials conducted at member hospitals across Australia. The vast majority of these trials are funded by international pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
Each trial relies on a tailored contract, with consideration for hospital-defined fees for multiple trial-based activities such as CT scans and blood tests. CTA tracks all trial-based activities, linking them to each hospitals’ trial-specific fee schedule, and thus ensuring hospital costs are recovered for all activities performed.
With upwards of 700 trials under management at any one time, and 25,000 transactions per trial per annum, this is a complicated accounting task.
No data transparency or automation
CTA Finance Manager Michelle Button says their previous system didn’t deliver the level of detail the company required.
“We could only raise lump sums – we were unable to detail the make-up of those sums. The functionality to provide that level of detail simply wasn’t available in our previous system, so we’d have to track that detail manually on spreadsheets”.
CTA required a financial system that could detail specific trial activities per patient within each trial.
“We also required automation and additional scalability to support our continued growth. The challenge was to automate our processes as much as possible, within a highly scalable financial package.”
- Michelle Button, Finance Manager CTA
Better integration, more oversight
Through a process of use-case assessment, CTA determined that MYOB Advanced Business would deliver the required functionality and were encouraged by MYOB’s long-standing reputation, which “mitigated our transition risk significantly,” says Michelle.
MYOB Advanced’s cloud-based system was advantageous, too. “Our previous financial system was hosted locally, so every upgrade had to be deployed on individual computers. Remote access while travelling was also problematic. Having MYOB Advanced Business in the cloud enables additional flexibility; in theory we can work from anywhere.”
Key customisations eliminate much of the manual work. “Automated uploading of data not only enhances efficiencies, it also helps maximise data integrity, by avoiding manual data entry.”
Detailed reports at the push of a button
CTA is pleased with the elevated quality of data and reporting. Michelle points to one example: CTA uses the Project module to evaluate each trial, which is invaluable for communicating with clients. “We’re able to export all the data into reports and provide summaries for our hospital members”, she says.
This detail helps CTA ensure transparency, and delivers huge time savings.
“To obtain that level of detail involved so many manual steps it took two days to process. Now it takes one hour. Efficiency gains were one of the key drivers in implementing MYOB Advanced.”
Before MYOB Advanced Business | After MYOB Advanced Business |
|---|---|
Reporting lacked transparency and detail Existing system wasn't scalable Manual work required days of additional manpower and risked data integrity Lack of integration with other systems Local system tied team to the office | Transparency and detail in reports Scalable solution allows for future growth Automation delivers reporting at the push of a button Integrated with other systems Cloud-based nature frees team to work remotely |
