Science Exchange Launches Clinical Development Solution to Revolutionize Clinical Trial Management
Science Exchange, a leader in supplier orchestration solutions for the life sciences industry, has unveiled its new Clinical Development Solution. This platform aims to streamline and enhance the management of outsourced clinical trials, offering pharmaceutical sponsors the tools needed to orchestrate the contracting and collaboration process with suppliers. Whether managing functional service provider (FSP) or full-service outsourcing (FSO) models, the solution offers an integrated approach to managing outsourced clinical operations.
Clinical trials are an essential part of the drug development process, yet they come with numerous complexities—especially as outsourcing in clinical development becomes more widespread. Many organizations face challenges when managing contracts, communication, and financial oversight of these studies. By converting fragmented data from PDFs and Excel spreadsheets into structured, actionable intelligence, Science Exchange is not merely digitizing processes but transforming how life sciences organizations unlock hidden financial insights.
According to Wynn Bailey, a former partner at PwC, “Science Exchange is not just digitizing budgets—they’re transforming how life sciences organizations unlock hidden financial insights, offering a new level of visibility into every aspect of clinical operations.”
The Business Process Challenges in Clinical Development
Clinical development, particularly for large-scale trials like oncology studies, involves intricate outsourcing arrangements, where managing a diverse set of suppliers is often overwhelming. The shift from full-service outsourcing (FSO) to functional service provider (FSP) models has further complicated clinical trial management. In an FSP model, sponsors have to directly coordinate with multiple specialized suppliers who each manage specific components of a clinical trial. This model has introduced new operational challenges and burdens for clinical operations teams, such as:
- Study Intake and RFI/RFP Management: Coordinating requests for information (RFIs) and requests for proposals (RFPs) across different specialized services often becomes a laborious process, frequently done via email and spreadsheets, resulting in inefficiency.
- Budget Lifecycle and Rate Card Validation: Ensuring that supplier budgets align with pre-negotiated rate cards in master service agreements (MSAs) requires painstaking manual review, increasing the risk of errors and misalignment.
- Collaboration Across Stakeholders: Communication between sponsors and various vendors is often fragmented and conducted through email, which can create silos and lead to miscommunication, ultimately resulting in errors that impact budgets and timelines.
- Tracking Change Orders: Managing budget amendments is traditionally a manual process reliant on complex Excel models and PDFs, making it difficult to track modifications and ensure they’re properly documented.
- Spend and Payment Processing Transparency: Consolidating data from a range of suppliers to generate accurate reports is a time-consuming task. Tracking invoices and attributing them to the correct budget lines often lacks clarity, leading to potential discrepancies.
These issues, while common throughout the clinical trial lifecycle, highlight the urgent need for a comprehensive digital platform designed to help clinical operations teams manage these complexities.
Modernizing Clinical Operations with Supplier Orchestration Software
The Science Exchange Clinical Development Solution was created specifically to address these critical challenges, empowering sponsors with a centralized platform to manage the intricacies of both FSP and FSO models. The platform boasts several key features designed to optimize clinical trial management and ensure a smoother, more efficient process:
- Digital Workspaces: The platform offers centralized digital workspaces where all supplier engagements, budgets, and contracts are managed. This provides sponsors with visibility and control throughout the trial lifecycle, reducing the likelihood of errors and improving the efficiency of collaboration.
- On-Cloud Budget Grids: The solution includes cloud-based budget grids that ensure strong compliance with trial budgets while minimizing version control errors. The digital format helps prevent the inconsistencies that often arise from paper-based systems.
- Rate Card Compliance Automation: One of the standout features of the Science Exchange platform is its ability to automatically validate budget lines against supplier-specific rate cards in MSAs. Any discrepancies are flagged, ensuring compliance and preventing costly errors at the line-item level.
- Real-Time Collaboration: The platform fosters seamless, real-time communication between sponsors and vendors, eliminating the silos that often plague trial management and delay progress. Centralized communication reduces misunderstandings and accelerates decision-making.
- Change Order Log Management: Change order management is fully digitized, allowing sponsors to track and approve modifications in budgets and services efficiently. The platform ensures that all changes are properly documented and provides an audit trail for compliance.
- Spend Data Mining: With the ability to centralize and validate supplier spend data at the budget line level, sponsors can extract actionable insights that ensure the alignment of spending with trial budgets. This helps track spending at both the study and program levels, improving financial oversight.
In today’s R&D landscape, where budget complexity is a key challenge, the Science Exchange Clinical Development Solution is positioning itself as a game-changer. By converting fragmented financial data into organized, actionable intelligence, the platform provides unprecedented visibility into budget line items, enabling sponsors to optimize costs and make more informed strategic decisions. “Science Exchange is essentially offering a digital Rosetta Stone for clinical trials,” said Bailey. “It’s about enabling precise cost optimization that was once thought to be impossible.”
Addressing the Challenges of FSP Outsourcing Models
The shift to FSP outsourcing models has introduced new challenges for clinical operations teams, particularly in managing a growing network of specialized suppliers. The Science Exchange platform is designed to mitigate these issues, offering a comprehensive toolset for managing the increasing complexity of these outsourcing arrangements.
Elizabeth Iorns, CEO and Co-Founder of Science Exchange, remarked, “The shift to FSP outsourcing models has created an environment where clinical operations teams must oversee a growing number of specialized suppliers, which brings unprecedented operational complexity. Our orchestration platform is purpose-built to address these challenges. Whether it’s a complex Phase 3 oncology trial or a central labs study, our solution delivers efficiency, transparency, and process compliance.”
Science Exchange’s Clinical Development Solution offers an innovative approach to clinical trial management, improving workflow automation, supplier collaboration, and financial tracking. By leveraging this platform, pharmaceutical sponsors can expect to see faster trial timelines, better communication, and enhanced visibility into all aspects of their clinical development processes. The solution is a major leap forward for clinical operations in the life sciences industry, offering a transformative platform that brings critical trial management elements onto a unified, digital platform.
As clinical trials grow increasingly complex, with more outsourced components and specialized suppliers, Science Exchange is setting a new standard for how these trials are managed. By streamlining supplier engagement, automating critical workflows, and providing deeper financial insight, the Clinical Development Solution positions sponsors to successfully navigate the evolving landscape of clinical development.
