The clinical programme one-pager: phase gates, submissions, and nothing leaves the building
A drug-development programme lives or dies on a handful of dates: first-patient-in, last-patient-out, database lock, submission. The team already tracks all of it — in a validated planning tool no director can open. Here's how to turn a clinical programme into a single board-ready page, with phase gates as milestones and RAG status, that never leaves your browser and never touches a vendor's server.
Ask a clinical operations lead for "the programme on a page" and watch the flinch. The plan itself is fine — protocol, site activation, enrolment, treatment, database lock, submission, all tracked to the day. The problem is showing it. Half the summaries in pharma get rebuilt by hand in slides the night before a governance meeting, dates retyped from a system of record that already holds them. And the other half never get built at all, because the programme is commercially sensitive and nobody wants an unblinded milestone list sitting on some marketing tool's cloud.
Both problems have the same answer. A clinical one-pager is a presentation of a plan you already own — and it should be produced somewhere the plan never leaves your control. That "somewhere" is a browser tab: the whole schedule is computed locally, nothing is uploaded, and when you do need to collaborate the session is end-to-end encrypted. Presentation-grade and audit-friendly, in the same artefact.
Phases are bars, gates are milestones
The clinical vocabulary maps cleanly onto scheduling primitives. Each phase — protocol finalisation, site activation, enrolment, treatment and follow-up, database lock, submission — is a summary bar: it spans from the first task beneath it to the last. Each phase gate — protocol approval, FPI readiness, enrolment complete, DBL, submission-ready — is a milestone, a single dated point that either has been reached or hasn't.
That distinction matters because gates are how governance actually reads a programme. A director doesn't want to know that "enrolment is 61% done"; they want to know whether the enrolment-complete gate will be hit before the site-monitoring budget runs out. Put the gates on the page as milestones, colour them by status, and you've built the exact view a steering committee needs — decisions on a timeline, with the supporting phases behind them.
Build it in four moves
Whether the plan lives in a validated scheduling engine, a study tracker exported to Excel, or a fresh outline you type by hand, the workflow to a board page is the same and it's short.
- Import — or build — the phases. Bring the plan in as MS Project XML, Primavera XER/XML, or Excel/CSV with column mapping; or just type the six phases as an outline. It parses in your browser — nothing is uploaded, the programme never leaves your machine. Each phase becomes a section with its activities nested underneath.
- Turn phase-ends into gates. Collapse each phase so Sketchedule draws its automatic summary bar (Fig 2), then promote each go/no-go point — protocol approved, FPI, enrolment complete, DBL, submission-ready — to a milestone. These are the diamonds the committee reads first.
- Add RAG and conditional status. Drive each milestone's symbol from a status column with conditional symbology: green diamond for on-track, amber for watch, red for at-risk, hollow for not-yet-due — computed locally from your data, no macros, no server. Set the data date and a status line so ahead/behind reads at a glance.
- Export, or share a read-only link. Brand it with a header, footer and logo, then export a landscape PDF or PowerPoint — or send a read-only link that rebuilds the whole picture in the recipient's browser. The schedule travels inside the link, encrypted; nothing is uploaded to a server for them to open it.
The app-faithful page
Here's what the finished artefact looks like: a single landscape summary, one row per phase, gate milestones on the timeline, RAG status per row, and the data date drawn as a dashed line so everyone reads the same "as of" date. This is the redraw of the clinical-programme example that ships in the app.
Conditional symbology does the reporting for you
The status colours on that page aren't set by hand. Each gate milestone carries a status value — from a column you maintain, or a rule against its own date — and the symbol's shape, colour and fill are driven by that value. Green diamond if the gate's forecast beats its baseline; amber inside a warning band; red if it's slipped past; a hollow diamond if it isn't due yet. Change one status cell and the page re-colours itself.
That's the difference between a summary that's true this morning and one that was true whenever someone last hand-recoloured a slide. And because every rule is computed locally on data you can see, an auditor can trace any colour on the page straight back to the value that produced it — no black-box macro, no server round-trip.
Confidential and collaborative at the same time
The usual trade-off in clinical reporting is brutal: keep the programme confidential (email a locked PDF, and re-email it every time a date moves) or make it collaborative (put it on a cloud work tool, and accept that your submission dates now live on someone else's server). You shouldn't have to choose.
Sketchedule's model removes the trade-off. The static route is a self-contained file or a read-only link whose entire payload is encrypted inside the link itself — presentation-grade, nothing uploaded. The live route is end-to-end-encrypted, peer-to-peer collaboration: two people edit the same programme with live cursors, a conflict-free merge, and an in-document change audit, without the schedule ever landing on a vendor's database. Review, redline, accept or reject changes — all inside a session only the participants can read.
None of this replaces your validated scheduling engine. If the programme is planned in a source-of-truth system, that stays the system of record — the network, the calendars, the critical path all live there. Sketchedule imports its output, presents it for governance, and refreshes from the updated master each period with a diff of what changed. The engine stays authoritative; the boardroom finally gets a page that keeps up with it.
| Clinical concept | On the one-pager | How you build it in Sketchedule |
|---|---|---|
| Programme phase | Summary bar (earliest start → latest finish) | Collapse the phase's activities; automatic summary bar |
| Phase gate (go/no-go) | Milestone diamond, dated | Promote the phase-end to a milestone |
| Gate status (RAG) | Green / amber / red / hollow symbol | Conditional symbology from a status column or date rule |
| "As of" reporting date | Dashed data-date line + progress fill | Set the data date; fill progress to it |
| Confidential distribution | Read-only link / self-contained PDF | Encrypted-in-link share; nothing uploaded |
Key takeaways
- A clinical one-pager is a presentation of a plan you already own — phases become summary bars, gates become milestones.
- Import from MSP/P6/Excel or build the six phases by hand, then collapse and promote gates — no dates rekeyed.
- Conditional symbology drives every gate's RAG colour from a status value or date rule, computed locally and fully traceable.
- Because it runs in the browser with nothing uploaded — and live collaboration is end-to-end encrypted — the page is presentation-grade and confidentiality-safe at once.
- Refresh from the validated master each period; the engine stays the source of truth, the boardroom page keeps up.
Put your programme on a page
Open Sketchedule in a browser — free, no install, nothing uploaded. Build the phases, promote the gates, and share a read-only link.
Primavera and P6 are trademarks of Oracle Corporation; Microsoft Project is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Sketchedule is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Oracle or Microsoft. Figures are illustrative, drawn in Sketchedule; Fig 3 is a faithful redraw of the clinical-programme example that ships with the app.