Customer stories


Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Research Consortium

In the Forefront

The fight against leukemia takes place on many fronts -- and just as important as what takes place in the laboratories is what goes on behind the scenes to organize and interpret the clinical data. At the Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Research Consortium (www.cllresearch.com), vital new discoveries are documented and distributed to member organizations through the online capabilities of FileMaker Pro, the award-winning database software application from FileMaker Inc.

Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia is the most common form of adult leukemia, with more than 17,000 new cases diagnosed each year across the United States. The CLL Research Consortium is in the vanguard of the latest research into causes and treatments. It's a multi-institutional research group funded by the National Cancer Institute and based at the University of California, San Diego, with associated work being done at eight major research facilities across the US. "The CRC is unique in that it brings together leading clinicians and basic scientists in order to conduct an integrated program of research focused on the determination of curative strategies for CLL," explains Director of CRC Dr. Thomas Kipps. "In order to conduct this integrated research program at sites located around the country, it was determined that an entirely web-based system for information management was required.”

That decision led straight to FileMaker Pro.

"We had four needs," recalls Director of Informatics Philip Payne. "We needed a low, total cost of ownership, rapid scalability, and an easy way to enable database access over the web. We also needed to seamlessly integrate with existing enterprise-level database management systems like Microsoft SQL Server. As there was no existing product or solution that did everything we needed, we built the system ourselves using FileMaker Pro."

The informatics workgroup at the CRC developed a system consisting of eighty databases containing millions of individual records. "They used a variety of novel approaches," Information Systems Developer Andrew Greaves continues, "the most notable of which was the adoption of the FileMaker Pro relational database management system to provide for relational data-marts as well as rapid prototyping and web application development environments. The resulting system has enjoyed great success -- while simultaneously demonstrating the efficacy of using off-the-shelf, cross-platform database development tools in the bio-medical informatics domain rather than traditional custom-developed software applications."

Now, the system hosts over 4000 sessions per month, with information on over 1300 research subjects being exchanged among researchers and clinicians. "Since initial launch," Andrew summarizes, "these systems have experienced an over 300 per cent growth rate in usage, with no realized performance degradation. Most important, the research group has been able to transition to an entirely paperless data management process -- yielding significant increases in efficiency and data quality."

And that means more efficient research toward discovering the root cause of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia -- and ultimately, progress toward a cure.



Contact information

Contact Info for Customer:

Andrew Greaves
Information Systems Developer
CLL Research Consortium/UCSD
858-822-5559
agreaves@ucsd.edu
http://cll.ucsd.edu


Filemaker Contact:

Kevin Mallon
Public Relations Manager
FileMaker Inc.
408-987-7227
kevin_mallon@filemaker.com
http://www.filemaker.com


Overview
  • The battle against the most prevalent form of adult leukemia gets a boost from the CLL Research Consortium's online information management system -- a system powered by FileMaker Pro.
Industry
  • Information Technology