For over a decade at Reify Health, we have been on a mission to remove clinical trial operations as the bottleneck on delivering new therapies to patients. Science should dictate how fast we get new therapies to patients, not clinical trial operations. As we get better at medical science, we need to be able to run more clinical trials to keep up. So, this already painful bottleneck will become even worse over time if we don’t do something about it.
We’ve known from early on that succeeding in this mission would require significant innovation across the clinical trial life cycle. We would need to break down traditional barriers to accessing clinical trials for patients around the world. We would need to develop improved models for how trials are conducted once a patient joins a study. We would need to orchestrate all the complex global logistics required to make these things happen at scale. Ultimately, we would need to increase clinical capacity (be able to run many more clinical trials each year).
In 2015 we launched two initiatives within Reify Health to begin covering some of that ground.
One initiative focused on bringing new-to-research physicians and their clinical practices – oftentimes located in underserved communities – into the clinical trial ecosystem. By systematically building new research sites over and over, we expanded access to clinical trials for patients, communities, and healthcare providers, while developing the expertise necessary to innovate in how trials are run. This initiative became Care Access – a company now leading the charge for our industry in building trusted, long-term partnerships with communities and making clinical trials accessible to those communities across the nation and around the world.
The other initiative sought to bring the research site’s workflow online – to connect the place where sites work to sponsors’ workflows and, eventually, the other key stakeholders in the ecosystem. In 2015, we saw that those stakeholders who were all working together toward a common goal (i.e. assessing whether or not a potential new therapy is safe and effective) were doing their work in silos. However, to predictably enroll clinical trials and deliver a high quality patient experience, we would need technology to connect the complex workflows of research sites, sponsors, patients, and other key players and allow for more seamless collaboration. We started by connecting sites and sponsors.
We created a new product model that allowed sites and sponsors to work together on a common platform (this sounds obvious and simple, but is really hard to do!), and we applied this new model directly to clinical trial enrollment. We helped sites more effectively pre-screen and enroll their studies. Simultaneously, sponsors were connected to sites' workflows for the first time, allowing sites to keep sponsors informed about trial enrollment with unprecedented real-time clarity and to save time doing it. Sponsors gained visibility into the inputs that dictated how a trial would enroll and could better manage enrollment to keep it on track.
This first step with our technology platform showed us and the industry what was possible when clinical trial stakeholders collaborate on a common technology platform. But critically, this was always just the first step on a much longer journey. We gave our platform a name that reinforced its more fundamental purpose – to bring the workflows of key clinical trial stakeholders (together, the “study team”) onto a common platform and help them work together as one.
So, we called it StudyTeam.
Our industry needed a connected technology foundation that allowed for more functionality to be added without creating significantly more work. A technology foundation that integrated with other solutions seamlessly, so teams can focus on doing work and not on tracking more logins and constantly relearning the multitude of technology systems required for each clinical trial. Technology to help clinical research become integral to healthcare and the patient journey – not something that happens in a silo. Sponsors, sites, patients, technology vendors, regulatory agencies – all these stakeholders must work together toward a common goal of bringing new therapies to patients.
One mission. One study team. OneStudyTeam.
Today, we’re taking a moment to share more about this larger vision and longer journey we’re on with StudyTeam. Moving forward, the team working on StudyTeam will be known as OneStudyTeam. Both new and familiar, this name reflects the mission shared by our technology and our people: to connect and enable every stakeholder in the clinical trial ecosystem to carry out the work of research better, sooner, and together.
OneStudyTeam, like Care Access, will continue to operate as a business inside Reify Health but will now do so using the OneStudyTeam name and brand to represent the business overall. The Reify Health name and branding will now be used in a more limited capacity to talk about the parent company of Care Access and OneStudyTeam as well as a founding member of the BRIDGE Initiative. All StudyTeam products will continue to utilize the StudyTeam name and branding. Our users will continue to access our products in the same way.
Most importantly for our customers, our partners, and the patients we all serve, the people of Reify Health and OneStudyTeam will remain the same. We’re here to continue driving innovation and teamwork in clinical research to close the distance between patients and cures.
Sincerely,
Michael, Ahmad, and Ralph