Interview with Veeva's Rylan Collins

This video provides an in-depth exploration of how Veeva Business Consulting helps pharmaceutical and life sciences organizations maximize their technology investments and transform their operating models, particularly within R&D and clinical operations. Rylan Collins, who leads Veeva's R&D Business Consulting practice for North America, discusses the strategies and benefits of leveraging Veeva's technology suite to improve collaboration, accelerate clinical trials, and enhance efficiency across various functional domains. The discussion highlights Veeva's role in guiding clients through process changes and organizational mindset shifts necessary to fully capitalize on new technological capabilities.

A significant portion of the interview focuses on improving collaboration between research sites and sponsors to accelerate clinical trial initiation. Collins explains how Veeva's Clinical Operations Suite, including applications like Site Connect, revolutionizes sponsor-site interactions through features like document exchange, payments, and study training. He emphasizes that while the technology provides these capabilities, Veeva Business Consulting's crucial role is to help sponsors evolve their operating models and embed these new ways of working into their organizational mindset. Furthermore, the discussion touches on Veeva's strategy to offer research sites flexibility in their technology use while ensuring seamless data sharing, exemplified by Site Connect's new capability allowing sites to drop files directly into the sponsor's clinical Vault without requiring specific site-side technology. This approach fosters "site centricity," speeding up activation, patient enrollment, and ultimately, drug delivery.

The interview also delves into strategic decision-making for mid-sized biopharmaceutical enterprises, particularly regarding outsourcing versus insourcing clinical trials. Collins explains how advanced technologies like Veeva's CTMS (Clinical Trial Management System), with its explicit oversight capabilities, can redefine what activities are considered strategic versus trivial. This shift necessitates a re-evaluation of outsourcing strategies, where Business Consulting assists companies in revamping their operating models for next-generation workflows. A key challenge identified for mid-sized pharma is the lack of transparency with Contract Research Organizations (CROs), often leading to a "black box" scenario. Veeva addresses this through CTMS oversight and real-time data transfer, providing sponsors with a clearer, more immediate understanding of study progress, enabling timely strategic actions.

Finally, the conversation explores the importance of a connected technology ecosystem, a central theme at the Veeva Summit, emphasizing "autonomy and alignment." This concept means each functional domain (clinops, regulatory, safety) has autonomy over its technology and processes but must align for cross-functional processes. Collins provides practical examples, such as connecting Veeva Safety to EDC for live Serious Adverse Event (SAE) transfers or to Medical for product quality complaints, significantly reducing manual interference, errors, and turnaround times, thereby enhancing patient safety. Veeva's approach to "smart automation" is highlighted as a key focus, distinct from AI but foundational for efficiency. While Veeva doesn't primarily create novel AI solutions, its strategy is to enable and facilitate customers' use of AI. Business Consulting plays a vital role here by helping clients think through the operating model implications—processes, resourcing, and outsourcing—when integrating new AI applications with their existing Veeva systems. Advanced analytics for site identification and selection, using proprietary claims data like Compass and Link, is also presented as an AI-adjacent activity that delivers significant insights.

Key Takeaways:

• Operational Model Transformation: Veeva Business Consulting's core mission is to help organizations maximize their investment in Veeva technology by transforming their operating models, processes, and organizational mindset to fully leverage new capabilities.
• Accelerating Clinical Trials through Collaboration: The Veeva Clinical Operations Suite, particularly Site Connect, significantly improves collaboration between sponsors and research sites, streamlining document exchange, payments, and training, thereby accelerating clinical trial initiation and patient enrollment.
• Flexible Site Technology: Veeva's Site Connect now allows research sites to directly upload files to a sponsor's clinical Vault without requiring specific site-side technology, fostering site centricity and speeding up data sharing, which ultimately benefits patient care.
• Strategic Outsourcing Redefined by CTMS: Advanced technologies like Veeva CTMS, with its explicit oversight capabilities, can alter the strategic value of clinical trial activities, prompting mid-sized biopharma companies to re-evaluate their outsourcing and insourcing decisions.
• Addressing CRO Transparency: For mid-sized pharma, Veeva CTMS oversight and real-time data transfer capabilities are crucial for overcoming the "black box" challenge with CROs, providing sponsors with real-time insights into study progress for more agile decision-making.
• Connected Technology Ecosystem for Efficiency and Safety: Veeva champions a connected technology system based on "autonomy and alignment," where functional domains share data and processes across clinical operations, safety, regulatory, and commercial, reducing manual interference and improving response times.
• Cross-Functional Process and Governance: Implementing a connected ecosystem requires a revamp of cross-functional processes and robust governance structures, often facilitated by external support like Business Consulting to establish Centers of Excellence.
• Smart Automation as a Strategic Focus: Veeva emphasizes "smart automation" as a key driver of efficiency across pharmaceutical workflows, distinct from, but foundational for, AI adoption.
• Advanced Analytics for Site Selection: Veeva leverages advanced analytics, including proprietary claims data (Compass, Link), to assist pharma companies in identifying and selecting the best sites and principal investigators for specific clinical protocols, optimizing patient recruitment.
• AI Facilitation, Not Creation: Veeva's AI strategy focuses on enabling and facilitating customers' use of AI rather than creating novel AI solutions. Business Consulting helps clients integrate their AI initiatives by guiding them through the operating model implications (processes, resourcing, outsourcing) of new AI technologies.
• Rethinking Operating Models for New Tech: Regardless of whether it's a new Veeva application or an AI solution, organizations must be prepared to rethink and redesign their operating models, ways of working, and processes to fully realize the innovative potential of these technologies.

Tools/Resources Mentioned:

• Veeva Clinical Operations Suite: A collection of applications for managing clinical trials.
• Site Connect: A Veeva application designed to improve sponsor-site collaboration and document exchange.
• Veeva Vault: A cloud-based content management platform for life sciences.
• CTMS (Clinical Trial Management System): A system within Veeva's suite designed for oversight and management of clinical trials.
• EDC (Electronic Data Capture): A system for collecting clinical trial data.
• Veeva Safety: A system for managing safety data and events.
• Compass: Veeva's proprietary claims data product.
• Link and Link Key People: Veeva's data products for connecting patients to sites and investigators.

Key Concepts:

• Autonomy and Alignment: A principle where individual functional domains have control over their technology and processes but ensure alignment for cross-functional workflows.
• Site Centricity: An industry approach that prioritizes the needs and experiences of research sites to improve collaboration and efficiency in clinical trials.
• Cross-functional Governance: The framework for managing technology and processes that span multiple departments or functional groups within an organization.
• Centers of Excellence (CoE): Teams or departments that provide leadership, best practices, research, support, and/or training for a focus area, in this context, related to Veeva technology and processes.
• Smart Automation: Veeva's strategic focus on automating highly manual, lower-value activities to significantly improve efficiency, often seen as a precursor or complement to AI.
• AI Facilitation: Veeva's approach to AI, which involves enabling and supporting its customers in their adoption and integration of AI solutions, rather than developing proprietary AI products.