As you look to adopt and scale a digital pathology platform at your life sciences organization, it’s easy to zero in on innovative features that will enable new use cases. You are, after all, probably investing in digital pathology to unlock added value by improving data integrity, streamlining sharing and collaboration, and uncovering new insights with image analysis and AI.
I encourage you to strongly consider this leading-edge functionality – and also take the time to evaluate the platform’s core features. You may be tempted to overlook capabilities that are standard on most of the enterprise software you use, but these features are common for a reason. They sit at the core of delivering a modern, world-class user experience no matter the application. But believe it or not, they may not be a part of the digital pathology platform you’re considering.
Roles, which are a group of permissions assigned to a specific user, and permissions, which ensure that each user has the access and functionality they need, are one such example. In working with our customers and future customers, I’m reminded almost every day just how essential roles and permissions are to accelerating breakthroughs. Here’s why.
Managing data access enables you to grow your team and add collaborators with a strong focus on data integrity
It goes without saying that research teams work with a lot of data across multiple studies. These massive volumes of data are critical to unlocking new insights. But they also introduce risk around maintaining data integrity – a challenge that can intensify as your team grows.
Roles and permissions help reduce this risk by ensuring that each member of the team only has access to the data they need. In Concentriq for Research, Proscia’s digital pathology platform, this access can be set at the role level or for a given repository of images. For example, a scientist could have view access to all repositories based on his role and edit access to a select group of repositories. An external collaborator might only have edit access to the repositories associated with studies in which she’s involved.
Ensuring the right users have access to the right functionality helps your team run more studies faster
Realizing the full promise of digital pathology means leveraging your modern platform for a variety of use cases – each of which depends on specific features and functionality. Consider that a program manager may need to create new templates, modify the standard field library, and create new studies to oversee the team’s research; meanwhile, a technician would manage images and edit fields when setting up well-organized studies.
As useful as the platform’s entire feature set is to the collective team, very few individuals need to use all of the capabilities. Granular permissions give each individual access to just the right functionality, empowering the team to adopt a diverse set of use cases and workflows for a variety of experiments by focusing everyone on their work. These permissions can also make it easier to adhere to study controls without limiting anyone’s ability to get their job done.
Self-administration means that your digital pathology platform works for you
No two research organizations operate the same, which means that there’s no one-size-fits-all digital pathology platform. I could write a separate post on the importance of configuration, but for now, I’ll leave it at this. Roles that your team can create and configure, along with permissions that can be enabled with a single click, like those in Concentriq for Research, help the platform to meet your team’s specific needs. And as your research efforts evolve, you have the flexibility to adjust your roles and permissions without any dependency on a third party.
While common enterprise software features may not be the most exciting functionality, they are essential to getting the most value out of your digital pathology platform. I hope that as you evaluate a solution to scale with your organization, you consider capabilities like roles and permissions, which will play a key role in transforming the R&D value chain from discovery to market.
To further explore what a modern digital pathology platform can do for your research organization, read about our solutions for life sciences research.
Luca Caneparo leads Proscia’s Application Specialist team and helps our customers to ensure that they realize the full value of the Concentriq platform.
