Chris McSpiritt

My Experience Helping the Life Sciences Industry

I began my focus on the Life Sciences industry when I joined ePharmaSolutions (a small eClinical startup) in 2005. During my 7 years there, I was able to guide our product strategy for our site selection, site training, investigator portal, and secure document exchange tools . It was during my tenure at ePS that I very vividly saw how technology can improve how clinical trials are run. When I joined, many of our conversations with clients were about how our solutions were better than Excel and courier services rather than about how we compared to competitors. Thankfully over time, the industry came to embrace the benefits that purpose-built technology can bring to the clinical trial arena and vendors began to compete more with each other than the status quo.

After ePS, I made the jump to consulting because I kept seeing good technology be stymied by an organization’s inability to properly adopt the tools. During my time doing clinical consulting, I was able to devote energy to helping organization define their process landscape, evaluate and choose the appropriate tools to support those processes, and then drive organizational adoption via change management and training.

After 7 years consulting, I felt compelled to jump back into the software world because I truly believe that user-friendly, process-aligned technology can drive drastic change for an organization. After evaluating my options, I joined Veeva because I am eager to see how the suite of technology we are building will revolutionize how pharma companies work.

My Technology Guiding Principles for Life Sciences

• Start with process definition before you design the solution

• Compliance and efficiency are not mutually-exclusive

• Data is better than electronic documents, which are better than paper documents

• User adoption is the most important part of implementation

• People who are part of the process in the real world should be part of the process in the system