After many months of nose-to-the-grindstone design/development/testing, I’m please to announce the launch of my new web app trialbyfire.biz.
It is a rich internet application to help clinical study teams manage drug trials (my wife is a clinical study guru and co-contributor to this app). Our goal is to provide an easy-to-use tool, which streamlines and simplifies the complicated task of running global clinical drug studies. It includes items like: milestones, outsourced vendor management, sites, enrollment, site visit calendar, etc). The app falls into the general category of CTMS (clinical trial management system), but focuses on the study management process (often managed directly by the sponsor company).
trialbyfire.biz uses Ruby on Rails 2.0 and MySQL on the server side, with ExtJS and JQuery on the client to provide the slick UI widgets and AJAX processing. ExtJS is a fantastic javascript widget library, providing robust and slick UI components. It was key to help meet our objective of making a web app to look-and-feel like a desktop office app (in a short timeframe).
I am using the rails gem Ruport to assist with the reporting/metrics suite. It provides a nice wrapper around the PDF-writer gem, to produce PDF documents from your rails app. Ruport has many great reporting features, so check it out.
trialbyfire.biz is currently in a limited beta release, and we will get some screen-shots up on the home page to better showcase the features and usability.
Tags: clinical trials, ctms, extjs, jquery, rails, ruport, study management
