4 Biopharmas and CROs Share Value Created from Veeva DQS

Jan 18, 2024 | Pavel Burmenko

Everyone is trying to get clean, complete patient data faster with less human effort. I need a bingo card for every time I hear someone suggest that AI will solve this problem. While there is a future role for AI in clinical data management, there is still so much value we need to extract from automation.

The foundation for this value begins with automated data ingestion, cleaning, and transformation for all data sources. Clinical data workbenches are designed for this purpose.

At the 2023 Society for Clinical Data Management (SCDM) and Veeva NA R&D Summit events, I saw a great deal of momentum and buzz around clinical data workbenches like Veeva DQS. These showcases were packed with attendees and questions.

The value is clear: Veeva DQS reduces cost, time, and effort to aggregate and clean clinical data. We heard several examples of this at the 2023 Veeva R&D and Quality Summit:

• A leading biopharma saves more than 60 hours of manual effort per week per study by utilizing Veeva DQS’s automation capabilities. This company automates about 30% of data verification performed manually outside of EDC, while 80% of auto-generated queries are closed without human intervention. Its vision for “clinical data on demand” is supported with data reviewed in Veeva DQS instead of spreadsheet trackers.
• Replimune brought central lab data into Veeva DQS and, for three Phase II studies, removed patient co-pays for labs, reduced the data entry burden for sites by 30%, and saved almost $1M in monitoring costs, per study. “The more sources of data, the more manual work it involves,” said Regina Norelli at Replimune. “We’re using Veeva DQS to begin pooling our vendor data and EDC data together to perform data cleaning in a programmatic and real-time way.”
• Alcon, a medical device company, currently has two Veeva DQS studies in production with all new studies adopting it by the end of the year. With its rigor in process improvement, Alcon has seen a 10-day median last patient past visit (LPLV) to database lock (DBL) cycle time. With Veeva DQS, “we can now join external data very easily with the EDC data to see the full picture,” said Leianne Ebert, head of global data operations for Alcon. “Getting data final, clean, and accurate as close to the patient visit date as possible allows us to lock down and secure this data faster and push it on for the analytical outputs, and ultimately, the CSR and whatever submission-related deliverables are required,” says Ebert.
• Fortrea is using Veeva DQS to enable a more holistic approach to data management, sharing “with Veeva DQS, we are getting to a point where we are not trying to clean data in silos, one side EDC, one side external data, but then we have this one big interface where we are cleaning the entire data set,” said Bireshwar Saha, head of global programming and analytics at Fortrea. “When you have to lock a database… you can go in Veeva DQS and you can trust that what is in Veeva DQS, it’s all in EDC. There are not two different sources where we are going to worry about that handoff. That goes away.”

Veeva DQS is still fairly new, launched over a year ago, but the pace of growth that we’re seeing is steady and exciting. More sponsors and CROs will continue moving away from spreadsheets and manual processes to aggregate, transform, and clean clinical data. We’re committed to innovating and delivering for our customers. By bringing complete data together, faster, we save human effort and dollars.

Learn how biopharmas are reducing data cleaning effort by >30% with Veeva DQS.