Novartis faced a massive infrastructure hurdle: over 1,000 statistical programmers and data scientists running hundreds of active clinical studies across fragmented legacy software platforms. To streamline operations and satisfy regulatory bodies, they launched QUANTA, a project to consolidate their global statistical computing environment into a single, unified, cloud-hosted platform built on Domino.
Because no commercial tool meets every specific clinical data and regulatory submission requirement out of the box, Novartis partnered with KSM Technology Partners to extend the platform. Using Domino's APIs, they custom engineered four core extensions to handle critical workflow mechanics:
- The RA Creator: A templated application that provisions data sources, code repositories, and user access in minutes instead of hours.
- The Task Manager: An interface built directly into workspaces that abstracts away git command-line complexity for programmers without software engineering backgrounds.
- The Batch Runner: A pipeline coordinator that reads version-controlled configuration files to execute heavy computing jobs in precise dependency order with full tracking.
- The Publisher: A controlled export engine that packages final study deliverables alongside all required structural metadata for seamless delivery to downstream regulatory filing systems.
Priya Subramaniam, Head of IT Clinical Enablement, Strategy & Growth at Novartis, along with Mike Harnish, President of KSM Technology Partners, detail the execution of this multi-year transition. They share how mapping 25 years of legacy data early and prioritizing process re-engineering allowed them to shift compliance from a human behavioral check into an intrinsic property of the platform architecture itself.