Ethics Compliance Management Portal

Introdcution

This project involved development of a bespoke application to manage the ethics compliance process of the MBA students. Staff and students undertaking research involving children and other vulnerable groups have to follow a rigorous ethics review to ensure the integrity and safeguarding of their research participants. This project converted the email-based process into a web application with stringent accountability controls. The process allows the researcher to answer a series of questions about their project and attach supporting documents. All these are sent to the nominated supervisor for review and then forwarded to the Ethics board for approval. The application also had the option to store questionnaires and research documents to create a one-stop shop for ethics compliance management.

Work Undertaken

Microsoft Power Platform was ideal for this internal facing, business process automation application. It was cost prohibitive to obtain PowerApps premium licenses for over 5000 users. Therefore, we were limited to the standard PowerApps subscription that is included with Office 365. The frontend was a canvas application and the business logic/email notification functionality was handled via flows.

The application was role based with 4 distinct roles:

1. Researcher: The researcher portal allowed the staff/students to create new applications and view their previous applications.
2. Supervisor: The nominated supervisor could review the application and forward it to the Committee for final approval or return it to the researcher with their comments. This allows for an iterative process, and documented all the changes being made to the application.
3. Ethics Committee: Requests approved by supervisors were reviewed by the Ethics Committee. Only after the final approval from Ethics Committee, the researcher was able to undertake the research process. They could also reject an application and return it to the researcher for resubmission, which started the whole process again.
4. Super Admin: The applications are retained in the system for a period of 7 years and then purged to comply with the reporting requirements. Super Admins could generate reports, manage user access and perform high-level administration without needing IT support.

A major challenge of this project was PDF generation. Since we couldn’t use premium PDF conversion task, we ended up using the default PDF creation task from One Drive to generate the PDF.

Outcomes achieved

A fully documented end-to-end trail was created for every project and made available for audits. In the first 3 months, more than 300 ethics compliance applications were submitted and processed.

Completion date July 2019