Introduction The NIHR Clinical Research Facility conducts a high number of very complex clinical trials. Each trial has an agreed budget and scope of work that can be divided across a large multidisciplinary team. Currently, it is difficult to know if the staff working on trials are working beyond the hours funded through the commercial agreement, and what additional activity is required to support the delivery of the trial. Indeed, some trials may become more intensive with respect to staffing than initially thought. The aim of this project was to develop an app to capture the time staff spend supporting commercial clinical trial activities with the aim of improving resource allocation and costing of clinical trials.

Method As part of a joint collaboration between GOSH and UCL computer science (CS) through the industry exchange network programme, CS students developed a mobile application and admin dashboard. The application was based on a standard 3-tier (presentation, logic and data), software architecture pattern. The presentation tier consists of mobile and web applications. The client-side was built using Ionic 4 and Bootstrap. A Node.js RESTful API allows the client apps to interact with a MySQL database

Results The application developed provides a tool for staff to easily and quickly report the time they spend supporting clinical trial activities. The data captured can be transferred into a web-based workspace for analytics. This allows the management team to ensure that costs for trials are more accurately predicted, and can be used to support business planning.

Conclusion A proof of principle system for capturing the time staff across multidisciplinary teams spend on each commercial clinical trial has been developed, this will facilitate business planning and the accurate billing of commercial Sponsors.