PharmaVOICE: Cognizant’s Life Sciences Experts Say that the Shared Investigator Platform is Driven by a Shared Vision for Optimizing Clinical Trials

Bhaskar Sambasivan, Global Markets Leader, Life Sciences, Cognizant, and Beenu Kapoor, Senior Director, Life Sciences Consulting. Cognizant

“Life sciences companies are under continual pressure to reduce clinical trial costs and the time it takes to bring a new therapy to market,” write Cognizant’s Bhaskar Sambasivan, Global Markets Leader, Life Sciences, and Beenu Kapoor, Senior Director, Life Sciences Consulting. Excerpts:

“Clinical trial challenges include subject retention, medical adherence, and managing the huge volume of administrative documents and tasks required of investigative sites. The administrative work necessary for startup and management represents approximately 30% of the activities required for any given study.

What’s more, clinical trials increasingly require dynamic, interdependent relationships among sponsor companies, investigators, and regulators — relationships that must be better managed to increase study efficiency and productivity.

Finally, new technologies ranging from social media to smartphones offer new capabilities that offer the opportunity to influence the clinical trial process and reshape the study experience for patients and investigators.

To address these efficiencies and enable greater collaboration, Cognizant, in partnership with TransCelerate BioPharma Inc., has built the Shared Investigator Platform (SIP).

Owned, hosted, and supported by Cognizant, SIP was launched in January 2016. SIP provides a common workspace to simplify the clinical trial process, enable sponsors to collaborate more effectively with sites, and share data and clinical trial information between a sponsor and its clinical sites. The platform is designed to provide a faster, more cost-effective means to manage clinical trials by improving interactions between sponsors and investigators.

The SIP is the first multi-tenant, single sign-on platform through which clinical trial information, operations, administrative documents, and tasks can be shared among sponsors and their sites. Several TransCelerate member companies and investigators developed the features that inform the design and development of the shared platform and provided oversight to ensure the platform provides an intuitive user experience and delivers the right functionality.

It is critical that platforms designed to support more collaborative and communicative trials offer the scalability and open design required to integrate new technology developments. SIP will continually evolve as technology advances to support the best, most efficient practices for streamlining clinical trials. The vision is that biopharmaceutical companies and sites will reduce time and cost on administrative tasks. At the same time, communication and collaboration between a sponsor and its sites, as well as data accuracy, should improve. SIP is driven by a shared vision for optimizing clinical trials to help the industry meet the demand for less expensive, more effective therapies, in a timely manner.”

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