Welcome to the HBR Video Quick Take. I’m Todd Pruzan, senior editor for research and special projects at Harvard Business Review. We’re here today with Jonathan Shough, chief information officer at Parexel, one of the world’s largest clinical research organizations. Jonathan has more than 30 years of IT experience, and he joined Parexel in November 2022 to drive the development of innovative technologies and solutions to meet customer needs in a constantly evolving and growing clinical trial landscape.
Jonathan is here to talk about the importance of digital transformation and its effect on the clinical research industry, as well as the impact modernized technologies ultimately have on patients clinical trials are designed to serve. Jonathan, thank you so much for being with us today.
Johnathan: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here, and I appreciate you asking me to do this.
TP: Thanks, Jonathan. What is a clinical research organization (CRO), and how has technology changed this industry?
JS: That’s a great question. First and foremost, a CRO is a contract research organization that provides clinical trial and research services predominantly to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and sometimes non-pharma, non-biotech companies as well. CROs generally test the safety and efficacy of new drugs, vaccines, and other health care treatments, for example, medical devices, before they’re made available to patients. So this process includes early clinical research, also known as prehuman research, and what we like to call first-in-human research.
The CRO industry is relatively new—it started in the 1980s. Although there were tools like Microsoft Excel, some databases and, of course, pen and paper, for years, there weren’t a lot of technologies that supported clinical research. But if you look at 2010, 2011 up to today, there’s been an entire industry that has coalesced around contract research and pharmaceutical research and development, in general, and it’s really expanded across the world.
TP: OK, so what does digital transformation look like at Parexel? What are you trying to achieve?
JS: You know, for our industry, there are two macro challenges. One is finding and retaining patients in clinical trials (and factoring this into the development of a new drug is really expensive). So at Parexel, we take a patient-first approach to do this. And in my role as the CIO, I see the importance of enabling our teams with the best tools and technologies and engaging capabilities that are, as I like to call them, digitalized to streamline and create more efficiency across the process.
An example is investing in utilizing real-world evidence, such as electronic medical records and electronic claims, or real-world data. This means using data from the social activities of people to help us find patients. The second challenge is finding the locations for clinical trials, as being part of clinical trials requires that patients go somewhere to actually participate. So we’re looking at how to bring these two things together with technology.
TP: OK. So Jonathan, what does all this technological innovation mean to patients and their communities?
JS: The work we do ultimately allows us to achieve the goal of delivering safe and efficacious therapy or treatment for them. We want to make it easier for patients to participate in clinical research. We want to reach out and educate folks—that participating in clinical research can help deliver outcomes from a clinical perspective that can get to patients faster, as we saw with pre-COVID therapeutics during the pandemic, right? So whether it’s orphan drugs, rare disease therapies, or CNS or oncology therapies, we want to use technology to bring these patients, investigators, and the work that we do in CRO together to allow us to deliver these vaccines and therapies to the market faster.
TP: Well, Jonathan, thank you so much for a great conversation and all your insights today.
JS: Todd, thank you and I have really enjoyed it. It’s a great way to get the message out there that participation in this industry is important to our health and the effects that it has on our daily lives. Thank you very much.
TP: To learn more please click the link below.
