Target Health, out of New York, is the prototypical e-CRO, a contract research organization that is serious about developing its own software. Target e*CRF is an electronic data capture and project management tool that uses the internet.

Jules Mitchel presides over Target Health with a cheerful exuberance undimmed by long service to the industry, inside the sponsor community and out.

He tells us Target Health is offering a new web-based program just for document management in regulated industries. It’s called Target Document. The tool is 21 CFR Part 11 compliant, with a full audit trail of access to documents in the system, which resembles the standard Windows tree of folders and files. 

Mitchel is the first to acknowledge there are plenty of pricey and low-budget systems to manage documents. While he thinks Target Document could serve any industry, regulated or not, contract research organizations (CRO) might see something they need. “Every business in the world has an issue with managing documents,” says Mitchel. “Our model is to provide a high quality product for mass use at an affordable price.”

At its most basic, the system allows folders to be shared, online, by two or three different companies (a sponsor and a CRO perhaps), with access rights and privileges assigned separately by each organization. “The CRO only needs one system for all clients,” Mitchel notes. “You don’t have to FedEx documents, you don’t have to email them. You know which version is the latest. The system allows the routing of a document for an electronic signature.”

Target Document: A standard Windows interface to upload files.

Perishable Files

Users can set dates on which documents expire, and dates on which documents go live. “You can say this document will be available in five days,” he notes. Alerts by email can warn of impending availability or expected expirations.

Target Document doesn’t allow multiple authors to work on the same document at the same time. Instead, a user “checks out” a document like a library book, and only that user can return the document to the system.

There is a commenting feature too, in which people subscribed to a document or a folder can be alerted to a comment via email. But all of the comments live inside Target Document for easy reference.

Find it Fast

Target Document, just like Google Desktop or the Apple operating system, indexes the contents of all files, not just their names. So you can find a document by using a key word or a word inside the document. The only trick is that it sounds as if naming files and folders in Target Document requires some training and care.

Target Document: Routing Documents Is Easy.

Mitchel is especially proud of the administrative functions to control access to particular documents and folders. Should an employee quit, Mitchel notes, Target Document allows an administrator to clone the privileges of that employee and assign them, en masse, to someone else. “An employee leaves?” says Mitchel. “It doesn’t matter.”

Pricing is variable, ranging from $10,000 to $100,000, depending on the number of users. The company offers an application service provider, pricing and models in which the customer would host the service.