A new report from Veeva has shown a huge swing towards unified applications and processes across a large majority of Clinical Operations Leaders. In the latest Veeva Unified Clinical Operations Survey, nearly all of the respondents surveyed indicated that they believed all processes and applications should be unified.
Challenges across the board
The survey, which researched the experience and opinions of 300 different clinical operations professionals, found that a huge 99% of respondents believed that their CTMS ought to be unified. 60% of the professionals surveyed said that faster study execution and improved study quality were the main drivers towards a unified system but it’s also believed that the amount of challenges involved with current legacy CTMS applications is another big driver. In fact nearly all of the respondents reported at least one major challenge with their current setup.
According to the report, the majority of clinical operations professionals now use an average of four applications while more than one third use at least five different applications to manage clinical trials. The majority of challenges faced were found to stem from the difficulty of using several non-unified applications; the top challenges were reported as integrating multiple applications and reporting across applications with other challenges including systems being hard to use, system inability to support collaboration, and difficulties with data being tracked outside of systems.
In contrast, respondents believed a unified system would give them better study visibility, faster study execution, and improved study quality, as well as better management, end-to-end visibility, and easier collection and leverage of data throughout the clinical lifestyle.
The path to unified clinical applications
Veeva has since gone on to demonstrate that this upswing in popular opinion has had a very real effect on decision-making, reporting that five customers – including one top 50 global pharma company – have already implemented Veeva’s new Vault CTMS despite it being only two months since the product’s release.
Vault CTMS, which is the industry’s first app to bring together CTMS, eTMF, eSource, study start-up, and site document exchange on one cloud platform has proven popular with early adherents who say it enables them to unify global data, content, and processes. New customer Lynn Sutton, the vice president of Clinical Operations at inSeption Group, called Vault CTMS an innovation. “Veeva Vault CTMS establishes a new era of innovation in clinical trial management with an easy-to-use, intuitive design,” she said. “We expect to drive new levels of efficiency and productivity by streamlining our clinical processes.”
Another new customer, Edward Leftin from Clinical Information Systems at Ora Inc. agrees, saying, “The ability to bring together CTMS, eTMF, and study start-up on a single, modern cloud platform is a real game-changer. Veeva will enhance our ability to leverage the same business processes and workflows throughout the lifecycle of all our studies.”
With so many industry professionals moving towards unified systems, and early customers providing such positive reports, it looks like more pharma companies will be adopting Veeva over the coming months and years. It now remains to be seen whether the challenge faced by pharma marketing teams and outsourced partners, who will need to adapt to the change of sales aid platform, will be worth the benefits of a unified system overall. If your pharma team or client utilises Veeva for digital sales aid presentations, why not find out more about our Veeva CLM development and consultancy services?