It's amazing how our customers have to "knit" together (i.e., integrate) multiple systems to run a clinical trial. There can literally be up to 20 systems involved in running a clinical trial depending on the situation. The act of "knitting" them together allows the customer to create a more unified and automated business process flow and at the same time reduce the amount of duplicate manual data entry performed by study teams, which can increase quality risk. Research shows the clinical research ecosystem is still highly fragmented, however, 70% of respondents expressed belief in a single vendor being able to provide industry-leading applications across the clinical trial continuum. Currently, sponsors and CROs have large-scale integration projects underway or planned to address the lack of integration with existing systems, which is cited in the research as the top challenge (84% of respondents) in the adoption of new clinical systems.

As we reimagine clinical trials with our Clinical One platform a substantial strategic dimension is how we will support our customers and their "knitting" needs. We need to reimagine these needs around our general interoperability strategy which, at its core, is all about minimizing the amount of information moving around by defining key concepts once and reusing them over and over again.