Reinier de Graaf successfully migrates 270 studies to ResearchManager

When CastorSMS discontinued support, Reinier de Graaf Hospital had to migrate 270 studies to a new system. The Research Office took this opportunity to refine their methods and processes.

Reinier de Graaf Hospital is the oldest hospital in the Netherlands and provides acute, outpatient, and surgical care to more than 500,000 patients in Delft and the surrounding region. As one of the 27 top-clinical hospitals in the country, Reinier de Graaf is committed to helping people stay healthy throughout every stage of life.

A forced transition turned into an opportunity

When your current study management system suddenly announces it will shut down, and you’re faced with migrating 781 studies, that is inconvenient to say the least. But Sjahnaaz Bholai, Research Advisor at Reinier de Graaf, chose to see it differently. Together with the Research Office, she used the moment to improve their workflows and processes.

“Everything functioned, but communication about research and reviews still happened outside the system via email. That made us rethink the setup. Because of the opportunities for process optimization and workflow integration, we chose ResearchManager.”

Strategic preparation with ResearchManager

Sjahnaaz spent two to three weeks preparing.
“What data do we need? How can we approach this with such a small team? Technically, ResearchManager could have handled the migration, but only after go-live. We preferred to go live with a fully populated system that researchers could use immediately.”

Plans were carefully discussed with the ResearchManager consultant.
“We reviewed all the options, the step-by-step approach, and key considerations. Which fields are essential, and do we want to upload individual documents or zip files? The collaboration was great. Having someone with experience say, ‘this is feasible,’ gave confidence. ResearchManager also set everything to inactive so we could populate the system without users being flooded with notifications. We wouldn’t have thought of that ourselves,” Sjahnaaz explains.

Copy-paste migration with quality checks

Ultimately, the Research Office decided to migrate only active studies: 270 out of 781. IT colleagues helped streamline the process.

“IT extracted all relevant fields from the Castor source data and gave us a sorted list. All I had to do was copy-paste the data into ResearchManager.”

The actual migration took two weeks.
“We divided the studies among the team. To safeguard quality, a colleague checked the migrated data from newest to oldest: Are all documents included? Are categories correct? During the transition period, when we didn’t have a study management system, new studies were also initiated. We tracked those separately in Excel on our shared drive and included them in the migration.”

“Helpful under VGO time pressure”

After the migration, Sjahnaaz wrote a manual and scheduled demo sessions for the hospital’s 480 users. Reinier de Graaf is now reaping the benefits.

Less email overload, more clarity

The new CTMS has integrated several processes.
“We now have an initial review process, a separate workflow for VGO, and another for contracts. The entire process can run through the system, including signing via ValidSign, with everything ending up in the primary file. Unlike CastorSMS, researchers are no longer bombarded with emails but receive notifications only when necessary,” says Sjahnaaz.

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