A big thank you for an awesome 2018!

Thank you for all your support and feedback this year. Your projects are the reason we come to work each day!

Enjoy this time with your friends and loved ones. 
The Spiral team wish you a safe and happy holiday period, 
Nga kirihimete,god Jul, Merry Christmas

BTW Spinnaker was used to randomise over 2,773 patients.  ... read more on our blog »

Congratulations PLUS

ANZICS Winter Forum from a Lead Developer’s perspective

Lead Developer, Cain Harland, joined Spiral many years ago and has been part of every web-based development the company has ever undertaken.
In 2011, Spiral founded Spinnaker Software and that same year Cain took part in his first clinical trial project, The Heat Trial. He has continued as lead developer for all Spinnaker trials since.
This year Cain had the opportunity to attend the ANZICS Winter Forum in Sydney. A quick trip across the Tasman with his wife was an extra bonus for Cain and the first time he had met many of the people that he works with on a daily basis.

In Cain’s words:
“I know them all well, I talk to them on the phone, get their enquiry tickets and emails and that works very well but it’s so great to actually meet them and put names to faces ... read more on our blog »

Manage your emails from Spinnaker

Did you know you have control over which emails you receive from Spinnaker!

Email notifications are a good thing because they let you know something has happened, like a patient randomised, or they help you remember to follow-up with a patient. But maybe you don't want to receive some notifications ...

head on over to our latest tip to find out how you can manage your emails »

Spiral is running the ANZICS Winter Forum iPad competition again!

The prize of a brand new, 32Gb iPad which will be presented on Tuesday the 28th of August immediately prior to morning tea. This is the NEW iPad that supports Apple Pencil!

Here's what we want you to do:

• between now and 8am on the 28th of August post a photo on Twitter
• include the hashtags #ctgWRF2018 and #spinnakersoftware
• follow the Twitter rules with your posts
• make your photos relevant to the Winter Forum
• you can be as creative or trad. as you like
• be in the room to collect your prize, or deputise someone to do it for you (we are not posting the prize)

Here's what we DON'T want you to do:

• create multiple accounts
• repeat your tweet or post duplicates

Here's what we will do:

• the judge (a talented amateur photographer) will look at all the tweets containing a photo that have BOTH hashtags #ctgWRF2018 and #spinnakersoftware
• the judge will decide which photo, relevant to the forum, he likes best
• the judge, alone, will decide on the winner
• our CEO will present the prize at the Winter Research Forum just prior to morning tea

BTW the judge's decision is final.

Good luck! We'll see you in Sydney!

ICU-ROX 1,000 patients enrolled

ICU-ROX has reached its target of 1,000 patients enrolled which means congratulations, not just to Paul Young and Di Mackle, who lead the teams but to each and every person involved. From the patients, to the clinicians, to the research coordinators to the project management team – it’s a pleasure to work with people, like you, who take positive action to change the future!

Congratulations to you all.

What happens when you ask for a change to Spinnaker

So you have found something in your study that needs to change. Heres a small insight into what we do when you ask for a change.

It could be that something in your CRF has changed, you have found a better way to do something or maybe something in Spinnaker is annoying you. Whatever it is, the path is the same and for the purpose of this example lets assume it’s a reasonable request and the change will be applied.

The change may begin with a Research Coordinator in a hospital who contacts the Project Manager with a suggested change.

The Project Manager passes reasonable requests on to us here at Spiral where the change goes through 3 phases …  development, staging/testing, and production. We have an environment for each of these.

Development

New requests for changes are scheduled and assigned to one of our developers. They make their changes and create a new version of Spinnaker for your project. They test the changes work before the next phase …

Staging

Once the changes have been made one of our team checks and tests a few things around the change including testing that:

• the changes made match the request
• the new functionality actually works
• Spinnaker is stable and continues to work as expected

Every project has a staging site which has a combination of the latest Spinnaker code on it and a copy of your study database. We have a whole server dedicated to our staging sites. If anything goes wrong here it’s not going to affect your study!
Then onto the next phase…

Production

When testing on the staging site is completed we schedule a release date. We time the release for a quiet time of day when there are few or no people signed in to your study. During the release we:

• check there is no-one adding or editing a form
• compare the database structure between the production and staging environments
• copy any database changes to the production environment. Only the database structure is copied, not any data.
• copy the new code to the production environment
• check Spinnaker is stable
• tell your project manager about the release

That’s it in a nutshell …. except of course we keep doing this in a continuous cycle because that’s Devops and Agile development!

Past and Future choices

Have you made any New Year resolutions? It’s that time of year when many of us wonder about the fresh new year where we get a chance to begin again, to set new goals and make new choices.

Perhaps you looked back at 2017.  For us, 2017 was our biggest year yet with 11 trials on our books and over 5,200 patients randomised during the year using Spinnaker.

At Spiral we have already made a few choices about what we are doing in 2018, they are:

• adding another server to our flotilla taking our total servers to 6. Five of which will be in Australia where most of our business now comes from
• aligning all our security practices with the ISO27001 standard
• completing 2 projects which are racing towards final delivery in March/April
  • One of these projects is a collaboration between Australia and Sweden,  two trials TAME and TTM2. I’ll write about that collaboration later in the year meanwhile you can read about these trials on our Spinnaker website.   TTM2 Trial »   TAME Trial »
  • The other (REMAP-CAP) is in the final stages of development and is big news for future health both in terms of trial design (it uses our response adaptive randomisation module) and in it being the largest study on severe CAP ever conducted … read more about REMAP-CAP »

With every opportunity presented we have a choice about how we look at it, how we plan and how we act; each new year is a new opportunity.  These are the choices I want to make this year:

• to be curious, to challenge the status quo. This is how we improve Spinnaker and why we are always working on it.
• to be kind. Even in business, kindness is the foundation to good work, not just in our relationships - we try to make our software kind i.e make it easier for you to use!
• to participate. Sometimes the easy option is to do nothing, to participate is to care enough to be part of something.

Best of luck with your choices, following through on them and in gaining some exciting results in 2018.