CIO named Dana-Farber Cancer Institute as a 2008 CIO 100 Award winner. The magazine presents the award to 100 organizations around the world that exemplify the highest level of operational and strategic excellence in information technology. The winners were announced in the magazine's Aug. 15 issue.

The award recognizes Dana-Farber for its implementation of a system to collect clinical research study data electronically. Dana-Farber clinicians and researchers had been using a paper-based system to compile data and generate reports, but the process was time-consuming and there was a margin for inaccurate data input.

Dana-Farber's electronic data capture (EDC) system uses Phase Forward's InForm™ Integrated Trial Management software to collect all data and generate documents electronically. This allows for greater organization and immediate sharing of data. Previously, data could take four to eight weeks to be accessed.

"We are honored by this recognition of our work in moving to electronic data capture for clinical trials," said Jeffrey Kessler, Dana-Farber's chief information officer. "EDC has reduced the time to access data from as much as eight weeks to real-time, and decreased the time to resolve queries from weeks to hours. This translates to more meaningful study results."

EDC was used in 2006 during a pediatric Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) study, which involved 500 subjects during a five-year period in nine centers across the globe. There were 36 unique case report forms and 49 programmed unique edit checks, which helped ensure data integrity; the case report form had 155 unique questions. Every patient in the study had to complete a total of 50 forms across eight visits, which worked out to 77,500 data points for the whole trial.

With the vast amount of information, locations and patients, paper data would have been difficult to keep track of and would not have been shared in a timely way. The automated system also has an edit-checking aspect to improve accuracy, which manual records do not have the capacity to do.

The award will be presented at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Aug. 26 at the conclusion of the tenth annual CIO 100 Symposium and Awards Ceremony.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (www.dana-farber.org) is a principal teaching affiliate of the Harvard Medical School and is among the leading cancer research and care centers in the United States. It is a founding member of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC), designated a comprehensive cancer center by the National Cancer Institute.