Florence Healthcare is a healthcare software company that specializes in streamlining clinical trial operations through advanced technology solutions. They provide software that automates and simplifies the management of clinical trial documents, workflows, and remote monitoring, enabling faster and more efficient research processes. Florence's platform is designed to enhance collaboration between research sites, sponsors, and contract research organizations (CROs), ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements while reducing administrative burdens. Their solutions are widely used in the life sciences industry to accelerate drug development and improve patient outcomes by making clinical trials more accessible and efficient.
Florence Healthcare’s business model revolves around the ability to accelerate the rate at which patients can apply and get accepted for clinical trials - they need to ensure their workflows are not only durable, but precise and fast. Prior to working with Orkes and Conductor, the team at Florence Healthcare was spending too much time building and managing infrastructure, rather than building mission critical applications and workflows to improve the goals and outcomes of their business.
Within the healthcare industry, specifically around clinical trials, there are currently no laws that require patient records, and other important documents, to be digitized unlike the financial services industry for example. Because of this, oftentimes nurses have to track down doctors to get signature approval, taking valuable time away from their job. While attempting to remedy these industry specific inefficiencies, Florence Healthcare has to ensure they are able to quickly build the right applications and workflows, and in doing so they need the right technology and partners.
Florence Healthcare faced significant hurdles in scaling its operations due to the time and resources required to build and maintain infrastructure. As the company grew, so did the complexity of managing the underlying systems that supported its workflows. Engineers were spending an increasing amount of time on tasks related to infrastructure, such as configuring servers, managing databases, and ensuring system reliability. This diverted attention away from their core responsibilities—developing innovative solutions to streamline clinical trials.
The burden of infrastructure management not only slowed down product development but also introduced operational inefficiencies. Moreover, the constant maintenance required to keep systems running smoothly increased the risk of errors and downtime, which could disrupt critical clinical trial operations. Florence Healthcare’s Chief Technology Officer, Andres Garcia, says “To me, as a CTO, spending time building infrastructure is a waste of time.”
Florence Healthcare has to ensure that every document containing a signature has a detailed record, for example if the signature was given as an acknowledgement or a sign off/approval. While this seems like a relatively simple task to accomplish, the team at Florence were in the process of creating more and more applications that each required an audit trail, which proved to be a difficult task as they scaled operations.
The company turned to Orkes for workflow orchestration, seeking to automate and streamline their processes, reduce the operational burden, and ultimately accelerate the pace of innovation in clinical trials. Florence Healthcare’s main goal was to find a way to abstract out all of the labor intensive processes around building and maintaining infrastructure, along with features and functionalities that were necessary in their industry, but didn’t have time to build out themselves.
With Orkes, Florence Healthcare was able to have their cloud on AWS, hosted by Orkes allowing their engineering team to focus on building new applications and automate many of their business processes. This led to the streamlined development of many microservices and applications that have ensured patients get swift access to clinical trials they desperately need.
"Infrastructure is not a value add from the perspective of my team building it. I want to use it like I use water or electricity."
Florence Healthcare has two small engineering teams that are utilizing Orkes daily. One team that is responsible for integrations that manages all of the data coming in and out of their system and another team responsible for automating small processes in the backend that don’t necessarily belong in the application itself but provide value via data transformation.
With Orkes handling the heavy lifting of infrastructure and DevOps in general, the team at Florence Healthcare has been able to develop and launch mission critical applications that are vital in helping the company succeed in its goal to accelerate clinical research by streamlining the management of clinical trial documents and workflows and bring new therapies to market faster by reducing the administrative burden and simplifying compliance in the clinical trial process.
Orkes comes with Audit Logs out of the box that enable Florence Healthcare to automatically audit any changes made to metadata within their workflows. As they continued to grow and expand their applications across their business, this feature made it extremely easy for the team to remain compliant within the standards of the healthcare industry without having to spend the engineering resources to build it out.
Florence Healthcare has been experimenting with utilizing GenAI to build workflows to implement a semantic search across documents and utilize Orkes’ prompt engineering to summarize document’s contents. Orkes makes accessing and operationalizing LLMs like AWS Bedrock simple and seamless.
Florence Healthcare's partnership with Orkes has been instrumental in their mission to revolutionize clinical trials by streamlining document management workflows and accelerating the research process. By leveraging Orkes' workflow orchestration capabilities, Florence Healthcare has successfully overcome the challenges of infrastructure management, enabling their engineering teams to focus on innovation rather than maintenance. This collaboration has not only improved operational efficiency but has also ensured compliance with industry regulations, thereby enhancing the speed and quality of clinical trials. Through Orkes, Florence Healthcare is well-positioned to continue advancing their goal of bringing new therapies to market faster, ultimately improving patient outcomes and making clinical trials more accessible.
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