Digital transformation is leading the clinical trial industry toward a much anticipated data-centric approach. Frost & Sullivan forecasts the Global Clinical Trial Data Management and eClinical Solutions market to cross $4.0 billion by 2020 due to the increased need for digital continuity, thereby driving unparalleled transparency and efficiency throughout the clinical development lifecycle.

Growth Opportunities in the Clinical Trial Data Management and eClinical Solutions Market, Forecast to 2020evaluates and discusses market projections, key trends, technology life cycle (adoption rate vs. maturity), key implementation challenges and growth opportunities. The research scope includes select high growth clinical IT systems such as: electronic data capture (EDC), randomization and trial supply management (RTSM), clinical trials management systems (CTMS), electronic clinical outcome assessment (eCOA), trial planning and safety solutions, and biostatistics solutions. Finally, the analysis provides industry best practices and strategic imperatives for key clinical trial industry stakeholders such as pharmaceutical sponsors, clinical research organizations (CROs), sites and technology providers.

"As the clinical trial industry transitions towards future biomarker-based targeted therapeutics and adaptive clinical trial models, the need for digital continuity theme has become critical across clinical trials IT framework to drive transparency and efficiency throughout the clinical development lifecycle," said Kamaljit Behera, Transformational Health Industry Analyst at Frost & Sullivan. "Clinical trial IT vendors providing eClinical modular solutions leveraging cloud-based, multi-tenant system on flexible Software-as-a-service (SaaS) pricing model will be more attractive both for CROs and Big Pharma, compared to function-specific point solutions licensing models."

As the industry seeks to shift towards cost-efficient and patient-centric clinical trials designs, mHealth devices, when integrated with bring-your-own-device (BYOD) platforms, demonstrate the maximum value. Emerging BYOD concepts provide an efficient alternative, as more than 30 percent of eCOA solution costs are associated with the supply of provisioned devices. Multi-modality eCOA solutions supporting BYOD concepts will help pharmaceutical sponsors and CROs to reduce hardware, maintenance and telecom costs, increase flexibility in capturing data, and reduce logistics cost.

Further growth opportunity trends include:

• Cloud-based modular EDC systems with intuitive user interfaces, capable of integrating all possible study and eSource data, with predictive analytics features, will be the key differentiator for emerging EDC systems;
• Convergence of healthcare with life science IT systems will continue to transform the clinical trial industry, driving the demand for informatics solutions to bridge knowledge gaps, empowering sponsors, CROs, and sites to make meaningful, data-driven decisions;
• New breed of agile modular RTSM solutions, which are 100% configurable with self-guided workflow for study design and randomization, will empower clinical teams to design, validate, and deploy a study in days instead of weeks or months, to meet the unique protocol requirements of adaptive study designs; and
• Cloud-based unified eClinical platforms help break traditional data silos, driving interoperability to provide significant cost and time efficiencies compared to traditional web-hosted or on-premise infrastructure deployment.

"The integration of eClinical platforms with an evolving ecosystem of connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices and solutions has the potential to change the process of clinical trials, making them more efficient and cost-effective, while accelerating research into new treatments," observed Behera. "Apart from optimizing the Clinical Trial IT systems at the backend, vendors need to leverage converging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), analytics, and visualization tools to provide real-time access for the data review process with intuitive user interfaces to improve collaboration among sites, sponsors, CROs, and patients.

Growth Opportunities in the Clinical Trial Data Management and eClinical Solutions Market, Forecast to 2020 is part of Frost & Sullivan's Transformation Health – Life Sciences Growth Partnership Service program.