COO, AG Mednet. McKinsey alum and Kellogg MBA, JP drives operational strategy for Judi across regulated clinical trial environments.
The clinical trials industry has spent billions on eClinical platforms.
And yet the most common complaint I hear from site coordinators and CRAs hasn’t changed in a decade, “I don’t know what to do next.”
Applied Clinical Trials published two interviews recently that name a problem we’ve been circling for years. In The Workflow Guidance Gap Holding Back eClinical Ecosystems, Cheryl Kole, VP of Solution Strategy at Almac Clinical Technologies, examines why eClinical platforms too often prioritize data flow over the day-to-day needs of the people using them. In The Organizational Factors That Determine Whether AI Delivers Real Efficiency Gains, Krishna Cheriath, VP and Head of Clinical Research Digital Data and AI at Thermo Fisher Scientific, outlines what separates organizations that realize meaningful AI gains from those stuck in pilot purgatory.
Both observations point to the same underlying problem.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we’ve been building platforms that optimize for features, not for people. We’ve added AI modules. Analytics dashboards. Integration APIs. And then wondered why adoption stalls at 40%. The answer isn’t more technology. It’s better process intelligence.
Think about the difference between giving someone a Swiss Army knife and giving them a step-by-step guide to setting up camp. Both are useful. But only one gets the tent up before dark.
The organizations seeing real returns share a common trait: they’ve invested as much in workflow design and user guidance as in the underlying technology. That means:
- Mapping processes before automating them
- Building contextual guidance into every step
- Not bolting on a training module after go-live and calling it done
Most eClinical platforms were built for data. Judi was built for the people managing it. Not another feature-rich platform that sits unused, but an orchestration layer that embeds process intelligence directly into the workflow, surfacing who’s responsible for each step and what the compliance implications are.
When a site coordinator logs in, they don’t see a dashboard full of options. They see what to do next.
