The objective of this project is to provide the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio with appropriate tools to manage the activities of the IRB and to provide appropriate training to the research community on the protection of human beings in research. The increased regulatory environment and workload expansion has not allowed the IRB to have a viable management tracking system nor to provide state of the art educational programs for the user community. An IRB Informatics Support system will be developed into which all protocols will be entered and tracked via web-enabled database. In addition, education programs will be created for the use of the database. Finally, a web-based educational course will be developed for clinicians and research nurses. The purpose of the course is to provide an overview of human subject use regulation, IRB protocol review and approval processes, development of appropriate protocols and informed consent forms, and other subjects relevant to human subject usage.
