A Site-Centric Approach to Clinical Research Tech

Veeva's VP of Strategy, Bree Burks, reveals the strategic vision behind their groundbreaking free CTMS platform—a bold move designed to democratize technology access for clinical research sites of all sizes. Discover why Veeva prioritizes site success through standardization and simplicity, and how selecting the right technology partnerships can empower sites to scale operations and thrive.

Transcript

Jimmy Bechtel: 0:00

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 Bree Burkes, the Vice President of Strategy with Veeva Systems, and she's here to share a little bit about what Veeva is doing to deepen their partnerships with sites. Bree really excited to have you. You've been along the road with SCRS attending our events, exhibiting, sponsoring, et cetera. So I'm excited to hear more about what you all are doing to again, further your partnership work with sites. But before we get into that, I'd love to learn a little bit more about you and a little bit more about Veeva.

Bree Burks: 0:44

Thank you so much for having me, Jimmy. Yes. I'm Bree Burkes. My personal background is. Nursing and really doing a lot of that traditional kind of clinical trial research nurse work across several different academic medical centers and leading teams and developing central clinical trials offices. I always will identify as a site, that work is so near and dear to my heart. They are really the front lines of everything that happens in a clinical trial. And so didn't ever have a plan to then sort of jump over into technology, but out of, really, I felt almost the necessity to have people that had done the actual work and experienced a lot of the challenges and benefits the technology Breengs. That led me into my current role at Veeva, which I've been in for a little over five years now.

Jimmy Bechtel: 1:37

Great Bree thank you. And really excited to chat through this. I know Veeva has always placed a strong focus on supporting sites. Can you share sort of setting up the conversation here a little bit of what that means in practice and how your partnering with sites to streamline some of their operations using obviously technology.

Bree Burks: 1:56

Yes. Well, it's really important when you're talking to technology companies or any kind of vendor that's providing an offering for sites to have an understanding of how are they committing to success for sites. So at Veeva, we have a dedicated team that does nothing but wake up and think about sites and what they need. We're not trying to just provide site services for the benefit of sponsors and CROs, we're really trying to do it to support their needs directly. And so having that focused team that does nothing but think about what do sites want, how can we engage with sites at conferences, how are we talking to them every day? How are we hiring people on our team with that background? That's also really important and it is unique because you often see companies that will start out in the site space maybe, and then just to grow their business. There is really a push for them to start selling whatever it might be. Maybe it's data that they've collected on sites or it's services that sponsors want to then offer across sites. And the market for selling to sponsors and CROs, there's so much more resources there, and they're bigger markets than selling directly to sites. That's something that we're always keeping an eye on at Veeva and making sure that the site team is completely separate and we're not getting distracted by the bigger market of sponsors and what sponsors need when we're thinking about ways to support our sites.

Jimmy Bechtel: 3:31

That's excellent, Bree, and really exciting. I wish everyone had that focus. It was really cool that just the team of people that's gonna wake up every single day and think about what can we do for sites? How can we make our products and our services more site centric. And capable for them is really commendable. And something I wish every vendor kept in mind there. So let's jump in then and talk about Veeva Site's, CTMS, which I know is your unique freemium model of your CTMS. And what inspired that decision, this concept of freemium or free entry isn't really common in the industry. And how do you see that transforming access for sites that are running maybe fewer studies and might not have the revenue stream to outright purchase a CTMS for example.

Bree Burks: 4:15

Yeah, it is unique in the industry. Certainly not unique in like the tech Sass world, but it is unique in our industry to have a freemium product and to offer a CTMS at no cost up to a certain number of trials. So the reason for that is we are really uniquely positioned at Veeva to think about the whole industry and about 80% of active clinical trials are touching our technology somewhere along the way, maybe multiple points along the way. And because of that and because we've been providing technology for clinical trials now for quite a long time, the the way to really improve the industry in a big way is, and I think other technology companies, are thinking about this as well, but it's to create connections. And when you think about the biggest challenge that technology hasn't solved at scale yet. It's the information exchange problem in clinical trials. Sites are really the linchpin, the flow through and the breakdown of all of that. At Veeva we've really thought, okay, could we get the market share of sponsors and CROs and in many of our applications we do have that. We are really the market leader in supporting their core operations. What if we can then get the market share of sites on our technology as well? And we can be the broker of the information exchange across these different stakeholders that are so key to the trial. The sites, and then the sponsors and CROs. In order to do that transparently part of our play has been, let's offer the technology for free, because what we've seen in the past is as other companies have tried to do this, when you're daisy chaining a bunch of different technologies together, or maybe you're forcing, Hey, we've got a whole bunch of sites, sponsors, you adopt this technology, or Hey, we've got a bunch of sponsors sites. You adopt this technology. The technology has to work for both parties, and you need to get good market share across sites and sponsors to really make a significant impact. Because there's so many technology players, the industry is so vast, and so a way that we're trying to get more sites on board and believers is to offer the technology for free. We, uniquely, are a public benefit corporation. We were the largest company to ever convert into a public benefit corporation, and we were the first public company to do that a couple of years ago, and that has really allowed us to focus on the site market in a very different way because it's not the main revenue generating engine of Veeva. And in a lot of ways, that gives us freedom. It doesn't have to be, because as a public benefit corporation, we're really thinking about society at large and what's good for our industry, not just how to turn profits with every decision that we are making. And so those things kind of combining give us this really unique opportunity to offer CTMS at no cost to sites. But the key is we want them to love it. We want them to, maybe they're interested because it's free as they grow their business and scale, but we want them to love it. And we've also very intentionally not taken out any kind of key features or anything of that nature out of the free product. The free product is very similar. There's only just a few little differences in the paid product. We're trying to make the best CTMS we can, that solves that information exchange problem that just so happens to be free for our smaller sites.

Jimmy Bechtel: 7:59

It's really cool, Bree because, the uniqueness of this model and this approach is really what stands out for me and probably for a lot of other sites is you're not gatekeeping anything with that. Like you said, if 90, 95% of the product is gonna be identical to a paid model likely getting any site that needs something like this into the space that they need to and allowing them to scale effectively using technology. Which is oftentimes we see such a rate limiting factor. The inefficiencies that are built around using spreadsheets and other mechanisms for tracking things really inhibit a site's ability to grow fast. It's really cool. And again, unique in that there's not a lot of opportunity for sites to take advantage of these kinds of opportunities to get their foot in the door with technology. It's also a tested and proven business approach in that we give them one technology, allow them to see how great it is and then, they kind of come back begging for more or, Hey, what else do you have? How can we compliment this suite as they grow they're able to bring on more solutions that fit alongside of that more conveniently. So that's really great.

Bree Burks: 9:03

Right. Thank you Jimmy.

Jimmy Bechtel: 9:05

How do you then balance, now that we have some background, the cutting edge tools that you're able to offer and the need of simplicity and ease of use at the site level?

Bree Burks: 9:14

Mm-hmm.

Jimmy Bechtel: 9:14

We often hear about how challenging it is to be really advanced and have the latest and greatest, but also keep that simple and keep it easy to use. How does Veeva work to balance those two things?

Bree Burks: 9:26

Yeah. Well, simple is hard. And so there's not a silver bullet, to answer this question, but I'll talk to you about how we think about this holistically. This is kind of about changing hearts and minds because we have had technology companies in the past really sell into sites and sponsors and CROs by saying like, Hey, you tell us what you want, and you're such a special snowflake, and we'll customize it and give it to you. And then a lot of the profit from the technology doesn't just come from the license of that software, but it comes from then having to continue to support and upgrade these very uniquely implemented systems. The problem though, when you think about our industry and how it works, and again, that kind of information exchange challenge that we have is when you don't have standards across these systems and you don't have standard implementations of these systems. That dream of exchanging information seamlessly now becomes incredibly challenging. We're having to change hearts and minds to get people to think, I know that you have operated with these preferences or in your own unique ways of working, but is it really required? And if it's not really required, and you could operate internally in a more standard way. Then when you have that connection opportunity with a sponsor and CRO and you're set up like many, many other thousands of sites, that connection can really scale. The other thing that we have to do when we think about simplicity is. In our industry because it's not like, when you think about some of these really cool tech innovations where nothing existed before, like an Uber or a Lyft or a Zillow, or an Amazon e-commerce. People were having to buy into the innovation, but they weren't having to switch out a bunch of already implemented technologies to get away from the customized version over to the standard version. No one's just gonna drop one big platform on our industry, and everyone's just going to rip out whatever they have and believe that this is gonna be the future and get on it for the long term and make a quick decision about that. It's really gonna take building products that are amazing at what they do that happen to be on this platform and really having a very long-term commitment to the simplicity and to providing the best of breed application to do that thing and over time really iterating across the industry, I think to get everybody, or to get the majority starting to operate in the same way. And that's also gonna require understanding standards across a lot of the ways that we work and really being bullish in a lot of ways to implement the standards. The other thing that I'll say is a lot of the lack of simplicity for sites oftentimes and it's not intentional. It really does come from these applications they don't select that they have to use from a sponsor perspective. To provide them simplicity when they're engaging with these sponsor technologies. Our goal is we can't let the sponsors configure and customize the site experience. We have to be responsible at the sponsor level for saying your sites are the shared resource they need consistency and quality. And sponsors, you're gonna have to start to offer that to them and really come together as an industry to provide that versus only having your own. Your own sites in mind and thinking those sites only really work with you on your trials when that's really honestly just not the reality. It's not just a one approach to provide the simplicity. It's changing the hearts and minds. It's taking on standards anywhere that we can. It's trying to work with sponsors to provide a consistent experience across sites. And really not budging on that on behalf of the sites and really having great products and being in this for the long haul to get that adoption that it will take to really bring simplicity across the industry. Something that we are absolutely committed to doing as a company for the long haul.

Jimmy Bechtel: 13:49

Thanks, Bree. It's really great to hear that you've listened to the sites because one of the major things that they talk about is exactly what you were referencing there. It's this consistency across the industry, working with your partners to help the sites build some of that standardization, some of that consistency or maybe not build, but maybe expect. Some of that, that's one of the things the sites have asked for is like, hey, some consistency behind systems and programs is really, really helpful to them because then you avoid the things like the retraining and the relearning and the reintroduction and all of the procurement and the tech implementation, IT related policies and processes that they need to go through to be able to even utilize some of that technology. The list is long as we look at the challenges, whenever a new piece of technology comes across the desk of the site, so it's great that that's a focus of, Veeva's. To begin to, wrap us up here, Bree, what strategies then looking forward and onto what we can do here and what's next, would you recommend to research leaders who are really trying to manage the complexity around execution and improve how we execute those trials?

Bree Burks: 14:58

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's such a great question. Couple things, first thing being as a site, I think you have more power than you think you do, especially, even as a small site, if you are a high performer, if you've worked with that sponsor before, if you provide quality, patients, and quality data. I see that there's such variation across our sites as far as what they expect when they're thinking about technology. Technology from sponsors or even technology that they select. Internally, I would say try and push for the standardization. That can look like, trying to get to the right person and build the right relationships and taking the time to do that at your sponsor and being strategic about the sponsors that you're working with. So that you can pick up the phone and have a conversation if you're being asked to do something that, for example, emailing out all of these documents that you collect in a system that, the sponsor can just log into and access. These types of things where sites are a lot of times asked by their CRAs, Hey, I just want this in email. Push back, educate your sponsors in how, if you do that for every trial and across every sponsor, you're losing the value of the processes and the systems that you've set up, because we definitely see that working for the majority of sites that are willing to build the relationship and to push back. There has to be a strategy within every site now, small or big, around technology and technology partners, and recognizing that not all technology companies, although all technology companies are gonna provide something great. Understand. What is the role of that technology company? Is it to provide this really cool special service that you may or may not need on every trial? You hear kind of like point solutions. They're gonna do this one thing and they're gonna do it really great. And where will they be in two or three years? How are they, like you were asking, how are they really thinking about site success? Really getting to know these technology companies and having a strategy and understanding the company strategy. Where the technology company is going. Not just focusing on the features that they have today and what you're looking for, but does their vision and value align with yours? Are they providing a very specific service that maybe you won't use in a standard way, but it's worth it? It's worth the value for those couple of trials, or to do the recruitment you need for that patient. And then really make sure that you're thinking about, who is that technology partner that's hopefully gonna support 80 plus percent of your operations day to day. And what should you be expecting from that partner? And making sure that they deliver on your expectations and you're really having more of a strategic relationship with a core technology partner and understanding where they're going in the future and where they're taking you. I hear that from sites all the time. As you know, our industry is going through different challenges right now with resources from a people perspective, from a funding perspective, that not all technology companies are able to keep up with the expectations that were initially set around the partnership. And I think sites really do need to hold their technology partners accountable for that.

Jimmy Bechtel: 18:18

Bree, I think that's a great place for us to end the conversation. Those are a couple of really great insights there. Sites you have more leverage probably than you think you do, and your voice is stronger than you think it is. Use that voice. But also what I heard there was align yourself with partners who share common goals, common mission, common vision that you do. And so that will perpetuate a much stronger relationship going forward. Well, Bree thank you for your time today. Really great conversation. It was awesome to learn more about what you all are doing in the space here. And thank you Veeva for supporting sites and bringing forward some solutions and some solution delivery models that can work for a variety of different sites. So thank you.

Bree Burks: 19:00

Thanks Jimmy for having me. It was a really great chat.

Jimmy Bechtel: 19:03

Well, I hope you all come away with some new learnings and perspectives for the work that you do. I'd also like to add that for everyone listening, make sure that you don't forget to explore other site focused resources made available through SCRS to our entire community on our website, my scrs.org. This also includes opportunities like our Site Solutions Summit, other podcast publications, and webcasts made available throughout the year. Thanks again for listening and tuning in, and until next time.