Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Tarek Sherif, CEO of Medidata (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How is it that you have 18 out of the top 25 pharma? Given what you describe, it seems to me like you should be having 25 out of the 25.

Tareq Sherif: I agree with you. But it’s a business.

Sramana Mitra: What is the explanation though?

Tareq Sherif: The explanation is, it always takes time. On these core systems, pharma is very slow to move when they’re on an existing technology.  >>>

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: CareDash CEO Ted Chan (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Help me parse what you said about TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor is actually become a booking site. Isn’t that how they make most of their money? I haven’t been following their business model shift lately.

Ted Chan: They look at it as a marketplace. When they show a sponsored listing, they are really showing it on what provider or what hotel or flight they think will monetize best for them. That’s the bid.

Sramana Mitra: How does that parallel with your model? Are you trying to do that as well? >>>

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Tarek Sherif, CEO of Medidata (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Have you started monetizing that? Have you started offering products on top of the datasets?

Tareq Sherif: We actually have.

Sramana Mitra: Give me an example.

Tareq Sherif: There’s something called a synthetic control arm. In pretty much every clinical trial, you randomize patients. A patient comes in and you get put into arm A, B, and C in this clinical trial. For arm B and C, you’re receiving the new drug or a combination of a new drug. Typically, arm A is what’s called a control arm. >>>

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: CareDash CEO Ted Chan (Part 1)

Have you experienced the nightmare of finding good doctors? How about getting reimbursed for a telemedicine consultation by your insurance company? This conversation deals with all those issues.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as CareDash.

Ted Chan: CareDash is the fastest-growing doctor review website on the internet. We’ve made it our mission to help patients make the right decisions about their healthcare providers and services. One of the things that we do that’s really different is we collect every doctor review behind a registered login.

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Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Tarek Sherif, CEO of Medidata (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What you just said is very interesting from a computer science point of view. So far, it seems like pharma has been developing drugs with clinical trials that have relatively small numbers of people whose data is going into trial input. The big data opportunity is to do this at a much higher scale.

You can collect data from millions of patients in the process of figuring out what works, whys, on what segments, and what kinds of biometric characterization. All of that is very viable. So far, it hasn’t been that viable. So far, you take small samples and you extrapolate. But it’s all becoming very viable and potentially, even cost effective to do this at scale. Could you comment on this trend? >>>

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Tarek Sherif, CEO of Medidata (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You put in context what might happen with the existing workflow of the drug development as we introduce more capability from a scalability point of view. Instead of a drug going through three or four stages of clinical trials, maybe it will go through five or ten stages of clinical trials going into broader and broader populations. But the data has to come in, so that there is a continuous monitoring of what is the impact of the drug on various populations.

Tarek Sherif: By the way, this isn’t just from a negative perspective. You can look at it from a positive perspective. You bring a drug to market and you see that it has positive side effects or it impacts patients who have a different diseases. We see drug repurposing all the time where it was designed for one thing, but it actually has an impact on something else. Those are the kinds of effects that you want. >>>

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Tarek Sherif, CEO of Medidata (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at all the things that they’ve been doing and all the product roadmap announcements that they’ve made, they’re going into clinical trials in a big way. That’s why I asked you the question. Historically, they have come out of CRM but clinical research organizations and clinical trials has been one of their big target areas. Are you starting to see them in deals?

Tarek Sherif: No, their marketing position is much stronger than the reality of where we see them. They have done a good job on electronic trial master file (eTMF), which again is document management. They’ve had a little bit of success in clinical trial management systems (Clinical Trial Management Systemz). We don’t see them at all in the electronic data capture (EDC) market, which is really the bulk of our business currently. >>>

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Tarek Sherif, CEO of Medidata (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: We have a little company within the 1Mby1M program called CleaningUp. Their discovery is that, as you said, a huge percentage of the workflow of drug development is still on paper and not digital. Especially when trials are held in international locations, people fill out papers.

They’re trying to transform that process into filling out iPads. They’re seeing a good deal of success in that world. It’s another niche phase of the market, but this is a company that is focusing on the part of the industry that has not moved online and it’s helping them move online. >>>