In April 2017 the CRCU relocated from its longtime 3535 Market street offices to the fifth floor of Blockley Hall, where it shares approximately 7663 square feet with the BAC and the Biostatistics PhD program. This space also includes a special document handling area available for processing large volume copying, scanning, and document mailing and postage activities normally associated with large-scale, multi-center clinical trial projects.
The CRCU computing environment is administered by PMACS and consists of leading edge technologies commercially available. All technologies used by the CRCU are production quality and fully supported by the respective vendors. This ensures that the most current vendor supported technologies are used for any project.
Research Informatics Tools & Resources
Veeva Vault – FDA 21 CFR Part 11 compliant clinical data management tool used to manage projects requiring FDA oversight, such as trials of an Investigational New Drug (IND) or New Drug Applications (NDA).
Oracle Development Suite – A set of database and programming tools used to create customized solutions for data management, reporting, and workflow control.
REDCap – A clinical trial data entry and reporting tool that is hosted by the Perelman School of Medicine. The CRCU uses this tool for rapid development of less complicated clinical trials.
Penn CRMS (Velos) – The Penn Clinical Research Management System tool managed by the Office of Clinical Research. The CRCU works with this tool for studies conducted by Perelman School of Medicine investigators.
PENN DnA – A research repository of clinical data maintained by the University of Pennsylvania Health System. This repository contains demographics, health history, diagnosis, lab results, and healthcare data that the CRCU can draw from in support of Penn based trials.
NIH Data Repository – The NIH maintains a repository of specimens and clinical trials data for projects sponsored by member institutes. The CRCU works with Penn investigators to comply with NIH data sharing requirements and to transfer study data to the repository as contracted.
Custom Website/Dashboard Development – The CRCU uses custom websites and dashboards as tools to implement real-time data visualization, and to disseminate study related information.