CTMS Customer case Clinical Operations Academic & Healthcare
Reinier de Graaf successfully migrates 270 studies to ResearchManager When CastorSMS ceased support, the Reinier de Graaf Hospital had to migrate 270 studies to a new system. The Science Office…
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Posted:28 August 2025
When CastorSMS ceased support, the Reinier de Graaf Hospital had to migrate 270 studies to a new system. The Science Office seized the opportunity to further sharpen their methods and processes.
The Reinier de Graaf hospital is the oldest hospital in the Netherlands, providing acute, outpatient and surgical care to more than 500,000 patients in Delft and the surrounding area. As one of the 27 top clinical hospitals in the Netherlands, Reinier de Graaf is committed to helping people in every phase of life stay healthy.
When your current study management system announces it’s shutting down and you suddenly have to migrate 781 studies, it’s annoying to say the least. But Shahnaaz Bholai, Science Advisor at Reinier de Graaf, looked on the bright side and took this opportunity to work with the Science Office to further sharpen their methods and processes. “Everything was working, but communication about research and assessments was still happening outside the system via e-mail. Then we started thinking about a new setup. Because of the possibilities for process optimization and workflow integration, we ended up with ResearchManager.”
Shahnaaz invested two to three weeks in preparation. “What data do we need? How are we going to handle this with our small team? In principle, ResearchManager could also do the migration, but only after going live. We preferred to go live with a filled system that researchers could work with right away.”
The plans were discussed at length with ResearchManager’s consultant. “We discussed all the options, the roadmap and points of interest. Which fields are needed and do we want to upload separate documents or zip files? That cooperation was very nice and that someone from experience said: this is feasible. ResearchManager also set everything to inactive, so that we could fill the system without all users being notified. We hadn’t thought of that ourselves,” says Shahnaaz.
In the end, the Science Office chose to migrate only current studies: 270 out of 781. Shahnaaz sought contact with her IT colleagues, and they helped handle it as efficiently as possible. “IT filtered all the relevant fields from the Castor source data and provided us with a sorted list. I only had to copy-paste the data into ResearchManager.”
The Science Office took two weeks to actually migrate. “We divided the studies among ourselves. And to monitor quality, a colleague checked the migrated data from new to old. Are all the documents in there? Are the categories correct? During the transition period, when the Science Office did not have a study management system, new studies had also been added. We tracked those separately in Excel on our shared drive and also included them in the migration.”
After the migration, Sjahnaaz wrote another manual and planned demo sessions for the 480 users in the hospital. Reinier de Graaf is now reaping the benefits.
The new CTMS has integrated several processes. Shahnaaz: “We have a piece of primary assessment, a separate process for VGO and for contracts. Basically, that whole process can be run through, including signing via ValidSign, and everything will be in the primary file. And unlike CastorSMS, investigators are no longer overloaded with emails, they only get notifications when needed.”
Are you unsure about migrating to ResearchManager? Find out during our free demo how data migration is easy and improves your research processes.
