We recently did a presentation to a person at one of the big 4 pharma.  His job title was

Senior IT Project Manager Specialized in Health IT.

I looked at the persons LinkedIn profile before the call and I noticed that the sentence is in past tense. Specialized in Health IT implying that he was now a Senior IT manager who no longer specialized in anything.

I have a friend who worked at Pfizer in IT. He was discouraged by pharma IT mediocrity especially  when he compared it to the stellar talents in the R&D departments.

So it stands to reason that the EDC vendors are just a notch up the technology ladder from the pharma IT guys. If you do not have a unique technology value proposition, you have to resort to marketing collateral gymnastics.

To test this hypothesis – I took a look at the web sites of 4 EDC vendors:  Medidata, Medrio, Omnicomm and Oracle Life Sciences.

Medidata

Run Your Entire Study On A Unified, Intelligent Platform Built On Life Science’s Largest Database.

At Medidata, we’re leading the digital transformation of clinical science, so you can lead therapies to market faster, and smarter. Using AI and advanced analytics, our platform brings data managers, clinical operations, investigators, and patients together to accelerate the science and business of research.

MediData is making a disturbing suggestion in their marketing collateral that they leverage other companies trial data in their Life Science Database to help you lead therapies to market faster.

Medrio

Clinical trial data collection made easy. The industry’s leading early-phase EDC and eSource platform.

The only EDC vendor that actually admitted to being an EDC vendor was Medrio. You have to give them a lot of credit for honesty.

Omnicom

eClinical Solutions for Patient-Centric Clinical Trials
Effective Clinical Tools Driving Excellence in Life Science Research

Software has the power to save lives. OmniComm Systems understands that power and delivers eClinical solutions designed to help life science companies provide crucial medical treatments and therapies to patients around the globe.

OmniComm Systems fills a role in enhancing patient lives by shortening the time-to-market of essential life-saving treatments. Our eClinical suite of products includes electronic data capture (EDC) solutions, automated coding and randomization systems, risk-based monitoring (RBM) and analytics.

This is nice positioning, but it makes you wonder when OmniComm turned into a healthcare provider of crucial medical treatments and therapies to patients around the globe.

Oracle Life Science

Oracle Life Sciences—Reimagining What’s Possible

Innovation in science and medicine demands new technology, and innovation in
technology makes new things possible in science and medicine. Oracle is equipping the life sciences industry today, for the clinical trials of tomorrow.

Solutions Supporting the Entire Clinical Development Lifecycle

Oracle Health Sciences helps you get therapies to market faster and detect risks earlier. Oracle offers a complete set of clinical and safety solutions that support critical processes throughout the clinical development lifecycle—from study design and startup to conduct, close-out, and post-marketing.

SOLUTIONS
Oracle Health Sciences Clinical One cloud environment changes the way clinical research is done—accelerating all stages of the drug development lifecycle by eliminating redundancies, creating process efficiencies, and allowing the sharing of information across functions.

Unlike OmniComm and Medidata,   Oracle is firmly focused on the clinical development lifecycle; not pretending that they are a healthcare provider or leverage the patient data in their EDC databases.

Flaskdata.io

Helping life-science C-suite teams outperform their competitors.

Patient compliance is critical to the statistical power and patient retention of a study.

We help senior management teams complete studies and submission milestones faster and under budget. We do this by providing EDC, ePRO and integration of connected medical devices into a single data flow. We then automate detection and response of patient compliance deviations in clinical trials 100x faster than current manual monitoring practices.