👉 Read the original LinkedIn post here
In my LinkedIn post, I introduced the idea of Bring Your Own Sign-On (BYOS) — allowing clinical trial sites to use their own single sign-on (SSO) for accessing vendor systems. This reduces login sprawl, improves auditability, and cuts down the frustration that sometimes drives sites to share accounts.
Here, I want to go further. Because BYOS doesn’t just help sites — it also opens the door for vendors and CROs to clean up one of the messiest parts of trial execution: identifying sites and users consistently across studies.
Why Identity Matters in Clinical Trials
Today, there is no single way of uniquely identifying a site or a user across different vendor platforms.
- The same site might appear under multiple variations of a name, address, or site code.
- The same user might be listed with different emails, slightly different spellings, or even re-created entirely for each trial.
- CROs, to avoid conflicts, often create new site and user records again and again — duplicating data and fragmenting identity management.
This creates inefficiency, increases reconciliation work, and weakens audit trails.
ROR as a Building Block
This is where the Research Organization Registry (ROR) comes in. ROR provides globally recognised, open, and persistent identifiers for research organisations.
- ROR is already widely adopted in the scholarly publishing ecosystem: it’s supported by ORCID, Crossref, DataCite, Web of Science, and many open-science repositories.
- More than 110,000 organisations are listed, covering universities, hospitals, research institutes, and commercial research entities.
- The ROR API makes it straightforward for software vendors to query, match, and integrate these identifiers into their systems.
By linking a clinical trial site to a ROR ID, vendors can reduce duplication and anchor site identity to a single, authoritative record.
How Vendors Could Use ROR
1. Site Identity Resolution
When a site is entered into a vendor’s system, the product could automatically query the ROR API. Instead of creating a free-text entry like “St Mary’s Hospital London”, the system could suggest matching ROR records. This ensures the site is recorded consistently across trials and platforms.
2. Organisation Metadata Enrichment
Each ROR record comes with useful metadata — official name, alternative names, addresses, country, types. Vendors could automatically enrich their site records with this data, improving reporting and eliminating ambiguity.
3. Cross-Platform Alignment
If all vendors linked site records to ROR IDs, sponsors and CROs could finally reconcile site information across multiple platforms without complex mapping exercises. This would reduce downstream data integration pain during study conduct and trial master file reconciliation.
4. Supporting BYOS
When a site logs in via BYOS, their authentication could be tied back to their employer’s ROR ID. This creates a consistent link between the user’s login and the site’s unique identity. Access rights, audit logs, and reporting could all then pivot around a common identifier.
What About Users?
ROR provides organisational identifiers, not individual ones. But if vendors start anchoring site identity in ROR, it creates a stable foundation for extending user identity management.
Possible next steps include:
- Using employer-tied logins (Google, Microsoft, or enterprise SSO) to ensure uniqueness of staff accounts.
- Encouraging standards bodies (perhaps ORCID, already widely adopted for researcher identity) to play a role in supporting clinical trial staff identity.
- Combining site-level ROR IDs with staff-level identifiers to build a complete, standards-based model of identity in trials.
A Practical Call to Action
BYOS can solve the immediate problem of login sprawl and compliance gaps. But paired with standards like ROR, it also gives us a path to something bigger:
- Cleaner data
- Fewer duplicates
- Simpler integration across vendors
- A stronger foundation for trust and auditability
The technology is already here — ROR IDs, the ROR API, and common sign-on services are widely available. What’s needed now is for vendors and sponsors to adopt them as part of everyday trial operations.
This article is part of my Accelerating Clinical Trials series, where I explore practical solutions that vendors and sites can adopt today to make research faster, cleaner, and more efficient.
Need Help Applying SSO in Clinical Trials?
If you’re a vendor or sponsor looking to build or implement clinical trial solutions that apply Single Sign-On (SSO) — whether through BYOS or by enhancing identity management with standards like ROR — feel free to reach out.
Through Clinflo Consulting, we work with technology providers, CROs, and sponsors to design and deliver solutions that are secure, compliant, and practical for sites.
🔗 Get in touch via my contact form
Let’s make clinical trials faster, cleaner, and easier — starting with the basics of how people log in.
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