Meet SCRS Global Impact Partner: Suvoda

In this episode of SCRS Talks, we welcome Rob Hummel, COO and co-founder of Suvoda, to discuss Suvoda’s new role as an SCRS Global Impact Partner. Rob shares insights into Suvoda’s mission to simplify clinical trials for sites and patients through cutting-edge technology. He highlights how Suvoda’s integrated platform — featuring core products like eConsent, IRT, eCOA, and ePatient — helps drive greater efficiencies at sites. Rob also offers a look into how artificial intelligence is shaping the future by reducing administrative burdens and allowing sites to focus more on patient care.

Transcript

Jimmy Bechtel: 0:01

Welcome to SCRS Talks provided by the Society for Clinical Research Sites. Thank you for joining us as we explore the latest insights, trends, and innovations shaping clinical research today. I'm Jimmy Bechtel, the Vice President of Site Engagement with the Society, and today I'm joined by Rob Hummel, the COO of Suvoda, here to share with us their excitement and recent joining of the SCRS Global Impact Partnership, or GIP, program. Rob, it's great to have you with us today. And it's great to have Savota as part of the GIP program as one of our newest members. Really excited to have you guys with us. We know you've been around exhibiting and attending SCRS events for a long time now, so it's great to finally make it official. Before we jump in and talk a little bit more about why you guys joined, Rob, I'd love to learn a little bit more about you and a little bit more about your organization.

Rob Hummel: 0:55

Great. Thanks, Jimmy. And thanks for having me. So, as you noted, I'm the Chief Operating Officer here at Suvoda. I'm also one of the co-founders at Suvoda. So I've been here since the beginning, and I've been working in the overall clinical trial technology industry for about 20 years, and 12 of those here at Suvoda as we've been growing this business. And so talking a little bit about Suvoda, what we overall aim to do is make it easier for patients to participate in trials and for the clinical sites and our sponsor companies to run those clinical trials and get the results they need to move forward with hopefully getting their drugs approved and onto the market. And we do that, we offer software and related services that are aimed at making that clinical trial journey easier and more seamless for the patients and then by extension for everyone else to run that trial. So each of the products we offer we offer 4 products: our eCONSENT solution, IRT, or randomization trial supply management, eCOA, and ePatient. Each of those is addressing a specific purpose within that clinical trial journey, and the lens we look at things through here at Suvoda is when we're building new products or enhancing our products is really focusing on things that are both mission critical to that clinical trial journey, but also time sensitive things that really need to happen at that specific point in time. And then figuring out how do we bring technology and the related services and support to bear to help solve that problem and like I said just make it easier to get through that specific portion of the clinical trial journey for patients.

Jimmy Bechtel: 2:29

That's great Rob, a worthy cause and by joining the SCRS GIP program we know that you have kind of dedicated yourselves and positioned yourselves to collaborate a little bit more closely with the research sites. So can you share how Suvoda plans to collaborate more intensely and intentionally with the research sites to address some of those challenges they face because we know there's a lot of challenges that exist for them when it comes to technologies like the ones that you had mentioned.

Rob Hummel: 2:59

Exactly. And one of the things, and we're really excited about the opportunity to be part of SCRS, because one of the things that we've focused on from day one in terms of product design is how do we make it easier for site users to use our products? How do we make things more intuitive for them? So we're really excited and feel really fortunate to get the opportunity to engage more deeply with those site users and really get a better understanding of the challenges they're currently facing so that we can let that inform our product design and how we structure our support around those products to really make it easier for the site users to get what they needed to do in the product done and focus on the care for the patients, which is what's most important. So, more specifically, we're, we're planning to participate in a couple of initiatives around digital innovation payments and specifically oncology, where we do a lot of work with the clinical trials we're supporting is in that oncology area. And we're also going to be looking at additional proprietary research that we can ask sites to participate in and that's gonna be focused on user behavior when using systems, some product and feature testing, additional training needs that site users might have an overall trends and challenges for some of the specific therapeutic areas where we do a lot of work with our sponsor companies, you know, oncology is being one of those, but also CNS rare disease where we have a lot of work understanding any specific challenges in those areas. So you know, we're really excited to get all this underway and start getting some of that feedback and hopefully some, some new insights from site users who are actually using the software in the field.

Jimmy Bechtel: 4:28

That's great, Rob. And I appreciate and I'm sure the site's do to kind of that multifaceted approach, right? Like, we're not just doing a survey. We're not just doing one thing. We're trying to address the challenges and the needs and understand what's going on with the sites and how we can improve things like the technologies that you guys are implementing and asking the sites to use through a multifaceted approach and who better to help you that than SCRS. So it's great. I'm excited for what we're going to be able to do together. And speaking of improvements, right, and moving things forward, we know that efficiency is one of the key factors in trial success and technology is one of the ways in which we can perpetuate that efficiency. So can you talk a little bit about how Suvoda's platforms and technologies work to help streamline that clinical trial operation process and improve efficiency and maybe part of that being kind of what sets you apart in that space from some of the other organizations that do this as well.

Rob Hummel: 5:32

Sure, so as I mentioned, I think really thinking back to even the early days at Suvoda, since day one, making the product easy to use for site users has really been a core principle we've tried to follow when we're building software, and that's because we understand that these site users are participating or running many different trials at once. They have a million things on their plate to get done. We're one small part of what they need to do in terms of just interacting with technology systems. There's a number of different technology systems that they need to use on a day to day basis and figure out and be trained on. So making as easy as possible has always been really important for us. I think when you look at the products that we're offering on our platform right now, a couple of things will become apparent. So when we have four different products, they're distinct and they serve distinct purposes, but they're all built on an underlying unified platform and what that means for the end user. So when a site user goes into the Suvoda system, what they see or what they experience from a user interface standpoint really is one system and they can't really tell where does eCONSENT end and IRT begin and where's the eCOA portion of this, because everything from an interface standpoint for our users, we've tried to blend that all together. That's on purpose that they can't really distinguish between those because we're offering an experience where they're going to go into the platform and the system will surface up what they need to do at that time, which patients have visits upcoming, what actions need to be taken, whether that's in the IRT or whether it's in the eCONSENT or in the ePatient solution. So on the front end for those users, they're really getting that seamless experience in Suvoda. They're not worried about what do I need to do in the IRT versus the eCOA if they're using Suvoda for all those products, it's much more seamless experience for them. And then the other major benefit that's provided by using the products on our platform is that the data is getting shared seamlessly in the background between these different products. So how that really shows up for the site user is, for example, let's say they're using eCONSENT and they're using the IRT platform, the system's surfacing up to them: okay, these are the consents that are still outstanding for your patient. These are reconsent activities that might be getting driven by a protocol amendment that you need to complete. And then since that data is being shared with IRT in the back end, the IRT system can gate certain activities and make sure that the appropriate consents are in place. Let's say there's a protocol amendment and you need the patients to reconsent before continuing on with the study. The IRT system is checking that and just serves as that extra double check to make sure that everything's in place that needs to be to support the regulatory obligations and make sure patients have signed off on what they need to. Another example would be in the eCOA platform where let's say there's screening questionnaires and the answers to those questionnaires are going to drive eligibility for randomization. That data from eCOA can be checked by the IRT system when you're going through the randomization flow to make sure that the patient is eligible. And for the site user, that does a couple of things. One, because they're not re entering that data from an eCOA questionnaire into an IRT system, it's just being transferred and checked in the background by our products. One, it reduces the workload. They don't need to spend time re entering that data that already exists. And two, for them, it reduces the potential errors that could happen where the data gets mis entered and that causes an issue with that eligibility check. So, by having these products both on the front end be very seamless to the user and really just surface up the tasks that they need to complete at that point in time. And on the back end, making sure that all the data is being shared and reducing errors and duplicate data entry. We think we're helping with improving efficiency of running the trials by using the products that are offered on our platform.

Jimmy Bechtel: 9:16

That's really cool, Rob, because a couple of things that I heard were integration. And we know that's been something that the sites have been talking about for a long time. The lack of integration amongst these systems presents a tremendous challenge for sites. So being able to offer that suite of services that are integrated, I think goes a long way to speak to my question is specifically around the efficiencies. Because that does provide a tremendous amount of efficiency and the back end data flow is another part of that because that's always been a little bit of a big question mark is how do I get data from one place to the next. So when those systems are integrated and the data flows like it should, you start to be able to glean some of those efficiencies. That's kind of what has been promised through these technologies. So it's awesome to hear that Suvoda's got such a dedication to that. And then of course the user friendliness, right? That user experience sounds to be really top notch. So that's awesome. And I think that's important as trials continue to become complex because we have to be able to find these efficiencies as we're building our technologies and we're building our systems in order to be able to execute again these more complex clinical trials. So I want to ask you as well. What sort of innovations like I guess what's next? What's coming to ensure that site teams are equipped to handle some of these complications? With intuitive and really streamlined processes. I mean, you mentioned some of them, you started to allude to some of them, but maybe expand on that or talk a little bit about kind of what's next here.

Rob Hummel: 10:54

Yeah, sure. So in the more general sense as I sort of alluded to, we really try to take that user centered design approach, really trying to figure out what the people that are actually going to be using this software need and how they would be using new features. And, and is it really going to be meeting their needs? So. That's an area where we do think, you know, being able to partner with an organization like SCRS will really let us get a lot more of that directly from site teams and understand, hey, what does really matter to you most? Or we've tried to make this efficient, you know, how could we make this better? So I think that's one area that we're going to be constantly iterating on, whether it's introducing new features or improving the usability and benefit of some of our existing features for users. It's gonna be great to get that that site team perspective and make sure that that's being fed into our product design. I think one of the recent areas we did with this was with the eCOA. When we launched our eCOA solution, we went through usability testing to get feedback from potential site and patient users to understand how do they like using the software? How do they find using it on the devices that the eCOA is being loaded on? And we really did get excellent results from that usability feedback, which we were really proud of, but also just going through that process really let us understand how are people actually going to be using this? And then, another product that we just launched, so I talked, we have 4 products: eCONSENT, eCOA, IRT, and ePatient. ePatient's our latest product. We just launched that earlier this year into our early adopter program. And one of the reasons we built that product was looking at the patient experience and the areas we were already touching, whether that's with the eCONSENT product or collecting data in the eCOA, how we were touching that patient experience, we saw that it is still a very complex, administratively challenging process. And as you alluded to, as verticals get more complex, it's just going to get more challenging. So what we saw as an opportunity for these patients who are already dealing with a difficult health challenge, probably the most difficult challenge they're going to face, or anyone's going to face in their life. How do we continue to reduce some of that administrative burden that's being placed on them. So with the ePatient product, we're looking to tackle areas like payments, getting reimbursements for their participation in the study and managing visit scheduling and visit reminders for the patient through an app and email. And have that be on the same app. They might already be using to answer eCOA questionnaires, or they already used to complete the consent. So the ePatient solution is aimed at making some of these other aspects payments, visit schedules, scheduling, getting reminder notifications, just a little more seamless for them. It's so that they can makes it easier to participate in the study for them. And then for the site users trying to take something else off their plate from an administrative standpoint, so that they can really focus on those patients and focus on running the trial. So that's, I think, one of the products we're really excited about launching and starting to get in the hands of some of our customers and starting to get some feedback on to, to just make running these complex trials a little easier on the sites and let them focus on real patient care, which is what's most important.

Jimmy Bechtel: 14:01

I couldn't agree more, Rob. I think that's, that's really exciting the future, right, and what you're trying to do here, enhancing that and adding additional functionality and features and kind of components to this suite of products, again, being integrated and allowing data flow to, like you said, I think that's what really matters here is allowing the sites to best meet the needs and serve the patients that they're trying to treat and provide these clinical trials to. Rob, I want to close this out with one final question, maybe kind of put the nail here in for us. What's about this future, right? As you're developing these solutions for the future and these new advancements and where you're headed for efficiency and clinical trials, how does being part of the SCRS GIP program really enable you and help you guys to meet some of those needs and provide those innovations? What are you, I guess, most excited about to be able to chart that course and walk that path?

Rob Hummel: 14:58

Yeah. So like I said, I think just one at the most basic sense is just to get that feedback from users. Like ultimately we want people to be able to get into our software, do what they need to do, do it accurately, and then get out and continue to focus on that patient visit. And how do we make that as fast and as efficient and seamless as possible. So one, just excited to really be collaborating and figuring out how to just continually improve in that space. And in addition to some of the innovations I've talked about are some of the products that we're offering. The other thing that we're really excited about is looking at how are we going to as a lot of people are build artificial intelligence A. I. into the product suite directly. And how are we going to leverage that? And this isn't yet released. It's going to be released, I think next next month or the very beginning of the following month. But we're introducing our first step into A.I. Being used directly by our end users in our product. And with that, we're gonna have an A.I. assistant where you were going to be able to, whether it's a site user or sponsor user, work with that A.I. Assistant to retrieve information more easily get information on what to do next. And we're gonna take a very cautious approach that there's a lot of things you need to balance around data privacy and making sure that you're managing hallucinations and the A.I.'s not giving incorrect information out. So there's a lot of testing and iteration that we're gonna do there. So we're approaching it cautiously. But I think it's a really exciting space because again, it just furthers that Mission of making as easy as possible to run these complex trials and as easy as possible for our users to do what they need to do. So rather than needing to go back and refer to training material or reach out to our help desk and spend time doing that to figure something out. Hopefully they'll be able to ask the A.I. assistant and get some information. Okay, here's the information you're looking for. This is the task that needs to be done next for this patient. This is why you're not able to complete this patient's visit. They need to fill out this assessment in eCOA first, surfacing up that information, making it a little bit more accessible to the user. I think 1, we're really excited about what we're about to release. And I think ultimately, it's going to fulfill that mission of just making it easier for people to use the software and focus on the clinical research rather than figuring out how to use the technology.

Jimmy Bechtel: 17:08

Excellent, Rob. I think that's a great place for us to end our conversation today. Really exciting things coming out of Suvoda and really excited to have you guys part of the SCRS Global Impact Partnership program. I'm again excited to see what we can do and how we can collaborate to bring these solutions to the sites in a way that works best for them. So thank you for being part of the GIP program and thank you for being here today in this conversation with us.

Rob Hummel: 17:34

Yep. Thanks. Thanks for having us, Jim. We're really excited to participate. And as I mentioned, I think one of the most valuable things for us is to really be getting feedback and hearing from people who are using the product directly and dealing with these challenges every day. So that's just going to be super useful in terms of us continuing to innovate and offer new features and functionality and tools to site users and to our customers ultimately make that patient journey a bit more seamless and as easy as possible.

Jimmy Bechtel: 18:01

A worthy endeavor. Thanks again, Rob. I want to make sure that everyone listening doesn't forget to explore our other site focused resources made available to you all, like various publications and webinar opportunities on our website, MySCRS. org. You'll also find a wealth of content and details about upcoming engagement and connection opportunities with companies like Suvoda and many others at our Global and Regional Site Solution Summit being held throughout the year. Thanks again for listening and tuning in and until next time.