Timothy Pratt
|
In 1969 Elvis Presley released the single "Suspicious Minds." It opened with the stanza: "We're caught in a trap...I can't
walk out...because I love you too much baby." You may well be suspicious as to how on earth this relates to EDC or pretty
much anything else pertaining to clinical trials. Stay with me, because it is very relevant to technology, and probably the
technology you use to get your job done.
Stuck like glue
It's all about technology vectors. First movers in any technology tend to get caught in a trap—the insidious position of heavy
investment in a technology to the point where they love it so much they just can't walk out.
Thomas Levitt, in his classic marketing piece published in 1960, "Marketing Myopia," identified the problem of companies that
come to dominate an industry through being first movers on a technology becoming so vested in that technology that they're
incapable of change.1 This is partially because they're stuck on a technology vector that just won't accommodate it, and partially because they
lose focus on the need they set out to meet and focus on their product instead. The consumer of first-mover technologies is often stuck with outmoded, obsolescent technology because the companies cannot
offer anything else. Examples surround you every day—the U.S. railway system, the NTSC television standard, analogue cell
phones, and perhaps the EDC system you're using. And, displacing newer technologies like the highway system, HD TV, digital
cell, and VOIP technologies are now being rapidly adopted. But what about EDC?
PHOTOGRAPHY: COMSTOCK, EYEWIRE ILLUSTRATION: JENNIFER FOLEY
|
A little history to understand the present: After early attempts involving Remote Data Entry, EDC really started being heavily
promoted seven to 10 years or so ago when some of the biggest technology vendor companies were founded.2,3 They had great solutions for the time, and while many smaller concerns have come and gone, some of the first movers remain
with us to this day—but they're caught in a technology trap at least 10 years old.
First-mover syndrome
Ten years is a multigenerational lifetime in computer technology development. Ten years ago cell phone IM (instant messaging)
didn't exist, and a lot of people were using 486 computers and thought they were pretty good. Even the Internet, at least
as it relates to widespread adoption, was in its infancy, and most software depended on a single operating system environment
and local installation to run.
Early movers in EDC technology simply took existing software designed to be run solely on a desktop PC and "webified" them.
This brought with it the attendant baggage of needing some degree of local software installation ("fat-client"), specific
operating systems (usually Windows—too bad if you use a Mac or Linux), and specific Internet browsers (that your IT department
may not allow, usually because of major security flaws)—all of which run the risk of making life hard for sites and sponsors
alike.
What an older technology vector means in practice to the clinical research professional is profound in the actual conduct
of day-to-day work, as well as future scalability and flexibility. Some maintain that advanced technology cannot perform say,
honoraria/reimbursement or CDMS functions as well as EDC.4,5 Is it true? Yes—at least for the technology in which they have vested heavily.
