You’re in the change business.
Is that what you thought of as you arrived at work today? It’s true. Working in clinical research, you bring positive change to the world, through the discovery, testing, and dissemination of therapies that improve people’s health.
No doubt your role (and mine) is a lot more specific and focused than that. It has to be, because clinical research is all about the details. To achieve the big changes, we need to implement, control, and communicate many other, smaller changes on a constant basis.
Sometimes, change is initiated from within. Sometimes, it’s imposed from outside. And at times, the whole context shifts. This last kind of change has dominated research for the past few years. Mobile technology, patient-centricity, healthcare upheavals, economic pressures, real-time monitoring, and genomic medicine are changing the context of how we approach research, and the nature of what we’re trying to accomplish.
Responding to this type of change requires clarity, purpose, and vision. A decade ago, a few of us started the OpenClinica project to inject a sorely needed dose of flexibility and accessibility into the clinical trials technology landscape. Now, we’re working to make it easy to adapt to the complexities of the new research ecosystem, while continuing to prioritize our original principles of flexibility and accessibility.
The biggest changes to OpenClinica in years are coming next month. As I’ll illustrate in my next post, closer to release, the new OpenClinica is designed to be both easy and powerful. It’s fast to adopt, simple to learn, and a joy to use, whether you’re a data manager, CRA, investigator, or study subject.
One thing that will never change is our commitment to the success of our customers and our community.