Monday, November 27, 2023

Taking Pharma to the Cloud

Heal the world. Save lives. These crucial “vows” that one makes to the universe often lie in the source of medical innovation. Pharma industry is one of the key industries that takes immense pride in fulfilling these by bringing people new therapies that help them to live longer and healthier. Along with advanced and cost-effective R&D processes, today pharma companies are working with cloud vendors to create solutions that address multiple pain points in the drug discovery process, rather than a solution with a singular function. Cloud undoubtedly facilitates faster pharma innovation. This is the key mantra of Veeva Systems NYSE [VEEV] as they aim to bring together applications for clinical, regulatory, and quality to help organizations seamlessly eliminate silos and speedily drive end-to-end business processes across product development, using their cloud platform. 

“Our business model is to be industry-specific,” says Peter Gassner, Founder and CEO of Veeva. “For us, the first part of making this work was finding a large industry, which life sciences is. Also, by having strong domain expertise, it means we have a much better idea of what to build for our customers and to better solve their problems. I like to say:  “We know exactly what to build and who to sell to.” This is in fact instilled in the core principles of Veeva as they believe in building strong customer relationships. 

Veeva streamlines all business operations and makes the most of every customer engagement with industry-specific applications that innovate how a company works. They are in fact the first and the only company to offer suites of unified applications on a single cloud platform across the entire product lifecycle.

We call this the “industry cloud”

With all applications on Veeva Vault or Veeva’s cloud application development platform, companies can streamline product development information across regions and departments for greater efficiency and compliance. The platform thus increases operational efficiencies by driving consistent, end-to-end product development business processes on a single system. This is made possible by Vault’s unique ability to manage both content and data in a single platform enables organizations to quickly deploy powerful applications that manage end-to-end processes with related content, data, and workflows. It also allows rapid configuration or modification of intuitive business applications without coding, management of content, data, and workflows on a single platform, and secure incorporation of all users. 

For instance, when Coloplast, a Denmark-based medical device maker, selected Vault as its regulated content management system, its employees could efficiently and compliantly collaborate and share content. “We needed a scalable, global, and easy-to-search document management solution that would adapt to our expanding business needs and meet multiple stakeholder requirements,” explained Orit Magyar, head of quality systems and processes at Coloplast. Coloplast now centrally manages all of its design history files with Veeva Vault, migrating 85,000 documents from its previous content management system in under 13 weeks. “Veeva Vault today transforms how our employees access and manage critical documentation.”

Creating a single source of truth

For the first time, life sciences companies can unify clinical operations and data management on a single platform to create a single source of truth, streamline end-to-end processes, and help sponsors, CROs, and sites improve how they work together throughout the clinical trial process. How? Using Veeva Vault Clinical Suite—a unified suite within Veeva Development Cloud. The suite combines Veeva Vault’s clinical data management and clinical operations solutions (Vault CDMS + CTMS + eTMF + study start-up) to deliver the most comprehensive suite of clinical cloud applications. This reduces complexity by managing clinical operations and data in a single system that automates and streamlines trial processes. It also improves decision-making based on an accurate, real-time, and comprehensive view of study status.

Alongside, Veeva also provides a global authoritative source for all regulatory content and product registration data or the Vault RIM Suite (Regulatory Information Management) on a single cloud-based platform. This includes submission document management, product registration management, health authority correspondence and commitments, submission archiving, and comes with fully integrated IDMP capabilities. The visibility that results from this unified solution streamlines global processes and improve data quality, helping life sciences companies respond faster to business changes, and health authority requests. The RIM suite enables stronger compliance and ensures reliable content and data quality. 

While driving compliance and operational innovation, Veeva also ensures quality management for global collaboration and visibility. Veeva Vault Quality Suite seamlessly manages all quality processes and content and enables organizations to modernize quality management. The suite is a complete solution for quality processes with regulated content and data across the organization and with partners for greater control. It comprises of Vault QMS—provides global management of quality processes, Vault QualityDocs—provides a single global source for all quality, manufacturing, validation, and other GxP documents, and Vault Training which manages training and related compliance requirements to ensure role-based qualification for job and audit readiness. 

Giving what they need 

“I’m always learning from my customers [about] how to serve them better and fix their problems,” notes Gassner. With a strong focus on Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Veeva builds effective and long-lasting relationships by engaging key stakeholders with the information they need. Veeva Medical CRM is designed specifically for medical teams, empowering them to foster meaningful and personalized scientific dialogues informed by a complete view of each stakeholder. It is an end-to-end solution that helps in engaging all stakeholders anytime, on any device. It also aggregates unique data across the entire organization’s history with a medical stakeholder, providing greater collaboration and a consistent experience.

For medical organizations, Veeva Medical CRM provides deep understanding of scientific needs and provides quantitative and qualitative metrics to help medical affairs formulate and drive organizational goals and strategies. It also allows coordinated planning and alignment with commercial teams while ensuring full control and compliance.

Transformation is the key

In a world where increased regulation, diminished customer access, and mounting pricing pressures are the norm, transforming business operations is critical. “From the start of our company, we believed the cloud would be the best approach,” Gassner says. Being the visionary behind Veeva, Gassner believed that vertical cloud software would be the next wave of cloud innovation. This vision has transformed Veeva into the pioneering leader in “taking pharma to the cloud”. Today, Veeva helps more than 600 life sciences companies bring new medicines and treatments to patients faster, and the journey still goes on…

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