Data science has become an indispensable catalyst throughout all phases of the drug development continuum, from early discovery and development to experimentation, clinical trial design and execution, to safety monitoring and patient outcomes reporting. The purpose of this quantitative investigation was to evaluate the impact of piloting a formal Data Science Platform Operations cross-training program strategically implemented in 2023. Durable supporting frameworks are known to enable and sustain rigorous use of powerful technologies; however, support models are often threatened by knowledge siloes even among the largest and leading healthcare organizations in the world. Retrospective extraction of Operations Support data (N = 4070) was conducted via ticketing databases with downstream analyses performed in SAS Studio. Rigorous inclusion criteria and random selection yielded an optimal sampling (n=420) to achieve quality results with minimal margin for error ( e < 0.05). The strategic mission of instilling mastery among staff was unequivocally met, as outputs revealed that the colloquially dubbed “Ops Academy” contributed to a statistically significant (α = 0.01) impact on productivity (t (420) = 5.68, P < 0.0001, d = 0.554). Comparison of descriptive statistics demonstrated efficiency gains exceeding 50 percent, as mean resolution times were reduced to 2.87 days in 2023 against 5.99 days in 2022 (CI = 95%). Ops Academy was tailored to cross-train support staff on the broad array of data science systems, tools, and infrastructure used within our organization. Importantly, while software and hardware vary from one institution to another, the authors recommend outside executives and managers consider replicating Ops Academy’s framework as a cost-effective mechanism to mitigate siloes, upskill staff, and motivate teams towards realizing their own mastery.
Duffy et al. (Sun,) studied this question.