Flo & Tell Live 2026: From Hesitation to Adoption

Hi everyone! Thank you for such a great panel experience. I loved getting to talk about our site implementation process (forever ongoing) and I learned so much from everyone else, too (the whole audience should get a top hat and sword!).

If anyone wants to connect and follow-up about anything, please reach out or post here! I feel like we could talk for hours about best practices and lessons learned for Florence adoption.

Our site had a lot of rollout challenges (consortium structure, non-mandated rollout, 2020 setting), but we also had a lot of champions. I want to emphasize these for anyone who is currently in pre- or peri-implementation

• Major top-down support: Our C-suite was fully invested (literally) in Florence, and saw the value it would bring to the site. I know this isn’t always common, but if you can find managers, PI’s, VPs to rally, it helps a lot! There wasn’t wide-scale proof of concept for Florence for us when we started, but there absolutely is now, and showing the bottom line can help. 
• Dedicated resources: Our site built into the initial budget proposal a dedicated staff team to support implementation. There was 1 FTE to coordinate and a few 0.5 FTE to train teams and do setup. Now, we have 3 full FTE to support Florence across our site portfolio, and I believe the early vesting in staff continued because roll-out was successful (and our site grew majorly in studies since, thanks in part to Florence!).
• Customer Service Model: I lead our dedicated support team (we oversee training, access, troubleshooting, permissions, etc.), and a major part of our successful feedback is that we use a customer service model. For coordinators and team admins, we respond with training tools and resources like templates, workshops, and whatever they need, but we also do our best to take things off their full plates (i.e. emailing Support on their behalf). For investigators, we do everything we can to alleviate extra clicks - we never ask them for screenshots, and we answer emails with solutions, not questions. (Instead if “Did you clear your browser?” we say, “Here are 3 things to try...” with clear instructions.) I know this is only possible because we have the first two elements in place (a dedicated team with institutional support!).
  • Because we give coordinators and admins clear tools, they can also support investigators on the ground, too, which takes things off our plate in return.

There are lots of models for adoption, this is just what worked for us, and I wanted to share.