Cloud-based operations support brings assurance to remote clinical trial

Maximising stability and security for a virtual clinical trial

When a clinical link was made between patients suffering from hypertension and greater risk of Covid-19 mortality, Closed Loop Medicine (CLM) was in a strong position to support further research to better understand the relationship. The company was able to initiate its pivotal study investigating CLM’s integrated precision care solution for patients with hypertension whilst also being able to simultaneously monitor COVID-19 symptoms.

The clinical trial, called Personal COVID BP, will see up to 1,000 patients recruited for a study investigating whether a combination product that links a drug to a smartphone app can enable patients to personalize and optimise their therapy regimen to treat hypertension. Importantly, the technology in the study allows patients shielding from COVID-19 to control their blood pressure remotely in a home-based setting environment.

It is vital that the platform underpinning CLM’s hypertension therapy package runs smoothly throughout the trial to ensure data is gathered efficiently and effectively. As with any digital health application, the security of patients’ personal and medical data is a high priority.

CLM holds DevOps expertise in-house but opted to extend this with the appointment of DevOpsGroup as cloud- based managed services provider. Our brief was to introduce measures to maximise platform stability, security and reliability ahead of the trial then monitor and manage performance for its duration.

“We needed to be absolutely certain that if any performance issues arose during the clinical trial, we would have the capacity and capability to resolve them fast. DevOpsGroup gave us the confidence we needed.”

Advanced cloud managed services

To address emerging performance issues before they escalate into a major event, you need to identify them at the earliest possible opportunity. Achieving this demands advanced real-time monitoring. We deployed cloud-native monitoring and analytics from Datadog across the entire application infrastructure to enable this.

Datadog integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring and log management to provide a unified, real-time view of status. We’re the only Gold member of the Datadog Partner Network in the UK, and we can deploy its technology directly as part of our own cloud managed services.

With Datadog in place, we can monitor the status of CLM’s infrastructure and application platform to keep a close handle on security and stability. This enables quicker identification and resolution of any performance issues, avoiding downtime and ensuring a consistent experience for end users.

CLM was well-prepared for onboarding at the start of the engagement. This put us in a good position to begin work immediately and ensure the platform was primed for optimum performance ahead of the clinical trial.

Assured performance

Our work has greatly enhanced CLM’s confidence in the platform’s resilience, reliability and security. User-friendly dashboards enable the team to see how the infrastructure is performing at a glance, and alerts are generated instantly if anything isn’t working as it should.

“It’s hugely reassuring to know that we have next-generation monitoring in place as part of our cloud managed services. DevOpsGroup knew exactly what was needed to give us faith in the application’s smooth performance ahead of this important clinical trial.”

Sharing the DevOps workload

With DevOpsGroup onboard to monitor and manage the hypertension application’s operational performance, CLM’s internal DevOps specialist can focus on other tasks. This enables CLM to work more effectively. We protect the performance of existing assets and are poised to scale our support rapidly if needed. Meanwhile, CLM can focus energy and attention on product innovation and improvement.