I recently attended the Clinical Trial Supply Europe conference with my colleagues Romain Arnaud, Glen Fisher, and Jennifer England.
It was wonderful to connect with both familiar and new faces on a whole host of clinical supply topics. The team had so many thoughts and ideas coming out of this that it was difficult to summarize succinctly, but I forced myself to pick three as a starting point.
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We, as an industry, are still talking about the same challenges that we were talking about 15+ years ago.
On several occasions, I asked myself, ‘Why are we still talking about this?‘. At times it was frustrating. Are we still talking about mid-study amendment timelines and helpdesk availability? However, in other ways, it excited me. It’s a personal goal of mine to ensure we solve these challenges once and for all and it seems that there is still plenty of opportunity to achieve this.
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Machine learning has a role to play, but let’s not let this sidetrack point #1.
If we’re still talking about the same old challenges, it seems premature to layer machine learning on top of these. It feels like an added complication rather than a solution. Let’s not talk about it for the sake of it, and let’s certainly not dress up supply algorithm approaches in new marketing clothing and call it ML. Good, solid foundations are essential, and this means tackling many of those long-standing challenges first. Only then, in my opinion, can ML have a truly meaningful application within RTSM.
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There is excitement about RTSM connections.
A great stand-alone RTSM solution is undoubtedly important to Sponsors. I don’t believe any responsible vendor should ever be ‘done’ investing in core RTSM product functionality and our Veeva RTSM team is solely focused on all things RTSM.
But a best-of-breed AND connected RTSM takes things up a notch. I had a number of positive discussions where sponsors agreed that connecting Veeva RTSM with Veeva Vault and partner applications will drive even further efficiencies for sites and sponsors. For example, connecting RTSM to eTMF means sponsors will always be audit-ready and will save significant hours of manual effort. This really resonated at the event. I know the team is very excited to continue these connection discussions.
If you were at the event, or have been at other industry conferences recently, do you feel the same?
Do you have a different perspective?
There were many more topics and this list could become 20 so let us know what resonated with you.
Written by Natalie Townsend, Vice President, Veeva RTSM Strategy, Veeva