A Systematic Literature Review Approach To Clinical Trial Informatics Systems: Case of caBIG and its Clinical Trial Management System

Abstract

An increased usage of clinical trial informatics systems will promote scientific institutions, benefit the worldwide research community, and assist in the rising trend of personalized medicine. This paper undertakes a systematic review to gain insight into existing studies on the Clinical Trial Informatics Systems (CTIS). In particular, we will focus on those articles that have worked on a special type of CTIS called the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG), developed by the National Cancer Institute, and its Clinical Trial Management System (CTMS) workspace which uses Clinical Trials Suite software. Based on the 67 extracted studies from 2001-2011, we classified the literature into the 3 broad categories of product description, analysis of options, and user behaviour, each containing some subcategories, and provided insight into each category. Moreover, this paper presents insightful recommendations for health institutions to enable them ensure that the adoption and implementation of a clinical trials informatics systems such as caBIG/CTMS will be satisfactory. Finally, this article presents 5 important gaps in the literature and calls for future research to fill those gaps.