ERT helps medical researchers accelerate clinical trials

Advanced observability speeds DevOps process and assures optimal performance of clinical trial solutions to drive faster time-to-market for new treatments and vaccines.

Friday, 29th May 2020 Posted 4 years ago in by Phil Alsop

ERT – a developer of software and devices used by medical researchers in 75% of FDA approved clinical trials in 2019 – is using Dynatrace to automate DevOps processes, and speed up delivery of new applications, from an average of six weeks to as little as two weeks. These applications help researchers worldwide conduct clinical trials safely and effectively and bring new treatments and vaccines to market faster. They also gather data and produce reports, supplying researchers with the evidence they need to secure approval for new medical advancements from the FDA and other regulators around the world.

“Our solutions are critical to our customers’ ability to get new, potentially life-saving treatments out of the laboratory and into hospitals and pharmacies,” said Simon Pilar, Director of IT Service Operations, ERT. “Given the high-stakes nature of their business, our customers can’t afford to miss important patient data or medical alerts during clinical trials, so we have to ensure the highest levels of quality, reliability, and performance in our solutions. At the same time, we need to challenge ourselves to continually increase the speed of innovation, to help our customers accelerate their trials. By providing advanced observability across our DevOps processes and app delivery pipelines, Dynatrace allows us to see the smoke before the fire starts to burn. We can stop bad code from ever reaching production, so it never becomes a problem.”

The Dynatrace® AI engine, Davis™, continuously monitors ERT’s DevOps processes and app delivery pipelines, watching for errors, degradations, and regressions. Davis automatically prioritizes any issues based on impact, saving developers time, and ensuring the DevOps team can find, understand, and resolve issues before they impact clinical trials. ERT also uses Keptn, Dynatrace’s open source control plane for cloud-native continuous delivery and operations. With Keptn, issues found by Davis can trigger automatic self-healing actions. This enables ERT to reduce development time while ensuring the highest standards of quality and precision.

“One of the major benefits of Dynatrace is that it’s so easy to use,” Pilar added. “We were able to deploy it in minutes. Dynatrace instantly illuminated our entire environment and started surfacing insights to our DevOps team, providing value within hours, not weeks or months. Davis, the AI engine, automatically identifies the root cause of any problems that arise, saving us time and giving us the confidence to automate our delivery pipelines. Dynatrace fundamentally changes the way we work, and allows our teams to deliver software innovation faster, without wasted time and effort.”