Recently, a few of us at OpenClinica received an email from a long-time customer who was leaving her organization for a new position. In it, she expressed her appreciation for our team’s “amazing ethos and genuine willingness to work collaboratively to find solutions.”
As part of our work with this customer, we successfully migrated the organization off a prior platform that “kept [them] awake at night.” We pour our heart and soul into delivering a great platform that is reliable, powerful, and easy to use. So, it’s refreshing to know our clients do indeed sleep better with OpenClinica.
Just as gratifying are the clients who choose to extend and expand their engagements with OpenClinica. An international, industry-leading diagnostics company, for example, inked a five-year renewal contract this summer. The renewal expands our relationship to 30 global studies and increases the total contract value by nearly 70 percent.
But great software is only as good as the people that design, implement, and support it. This is especially true for complex initiatives like migrations, but it applies to every study and customer we support at OpenClinica.
The passion of our staff – as well as our commitment to listening to and engaging with our clients – certainly were in full view at OC23, our biggest user conference to date, having over 65 attendees, seven guest speakers and 17 educational sessions.
I take enormous pride in our technology products, and even more so in our team that pours their heart and soul into helping our customers have great experiences. This is true throughout the organization – nobody on the team is too senior or too junior to take a deep dive into a user or colleague’s problem and collaborate on a solution. Even as OpenClinica has grown significantly over the past few years, we’ve been able to maintain this key aspect of our culture, due to the passion of our staff. Often, it’s these deep dives by our staff that spur the most significant innovations in our products and user experience. In 2023, OpenClinica:
- Debuted eConsent,
- Improved our EDC with auto-generated, annotated CRFs, which are crucial for statistical analysis and study regulatory submissions,
- Introduced automated and improved deployment and implementation, increasing reliability and reducing disruption, and
- Added internationalization with multi-language capabilities.
The growth of the Unite EHR eSource network was a major focus in 2023 and will continue to be in 2024. We expanded partnerships with major U.S. health systems, and expanded from two to seven native data domains. We now have labs, medications, immunizations, encounters, demographics, conditions and procedures 100% out of the box. In 2024, the Unite network will offer our customers even more opportunities to leverage what we’ve created during the past three years to run trials in a faster, more automated way.
We announced our partnership with Thompson Street Capital Partners in February 2023: “TSCP is proud to back Cal, Ben, and their management team to advance their growth and leadership position in eClinical technology, and we look forward to working with them to drive the company’s next phase of growth.” We have a shared vision of the future; OpenClinica has benefited greatly from their expertise in operations and management and will continue to do so as we scale.
In early 2024 we will introduce study calendar tools that predict and track trial activities, and handle complex protocol designs such as multi-arm oncology platform trials. These innovations will vastly improve automation of each participant’s path through the protocol, improving quality by enabling researchers, clinicians, and patients to track in real-time that milestones are completed when they are supposed to be.
I believe in 2024 will bring a level of change in clinical research that dwarfs anything seen in the last decade. This includes scaling up of EHR eSource, early steps to harness AI and large language models for innovative applications, and continuing to deploy technology that helps to reach and empower patients.
I am extremely excited about the year ahead as we continue OpenClinica’s mission to enable better data, faster!