A decade of failed CTMS implementations is an expensive way to learn that most platforms are built without input from the people who operate them. PharPoint Research’s decision to join Medrio’s Early Adopter Program was, at its core, a bet that a seat at the product design table was worth more than a finished product delivered late.
PharPoint, a CRO that has supported, had been through two resource-heavy CTMS implementations that left operational workarounds in place rather than solving the underlying problems. The Early Adopter Program gave the company direct access to Medrio’s product team from early planning through testing, which meant PharPoint’s clinical ops staff shaped feature decisions rather than filed support tickets after the fact. Jayme Swinson, Maribeth Owings, and Nickie Carver from PharPoint’s operations team contributed directly to that process.
What makes this arrangement worth watching is the model it represents, not the marketing claim. CROs typically absorb CTMS friction silently: staff build manual fixes, use outside tools to compensate, and carry those costs across every trial they run. PharPoint’s participation flipped that dynamic by converting internal pain points into product requirements before the system shipped. The result Medrio and PharPoint describe is workflows designed around how clinical ops teams actually work, with fewer manual patches required. Medrio’s CTMS operates in a validated environment meeting FDA 21 CFR Part 11 requirements, so any workflow change PharPoint influenced still had to hold up under audit trail and data privacy standards.
The practical consequence for other mid-size CROs is a question worth asking their own vendors: does the implementation process include any structured mechanism for operational staff to shape the product, or does feedback only flow through a post-launch ticketing queue? For PharPoint, the answer to that question was worth switching platforms entirely after two attempts that didn’t fit.
Source link: https://medrio.com/case-studies/pharpoint-early-adopter-program-ctms/
Moe Alsumidaie, MBA, MSF, is founder and Chief Editor of Vanguard Publications, which publishes Clinical Trial Vanguard, Pharma Vanguard and BullScope, and Head of Research at CliniBiz. He has two decades in clinical trial operations and data science, with earlier roles at Genentech, Abbott Vascular and Stanford University Medical Center, and is a guest lecturer in clinical trial sciences at Rutgers University.
