How to Scale Your Digital Health Teams Quickly and Efficiently

Overview

An eClinical technology company needed a way to quickly and flexibly add digital health experts to their delivery teams to meet study timelines. Between navigating complex regulatory requirements and meeting aggressive study timelines, this company needed the right talent to deliver reliable digital health solutions to clinical trial sponsors. Studion’s flexible partnership model helped them scale efficiently and deliver on time.

Rapidly scaled team by over 15x within one year.

The Challenge

Our partner needed a 3x increase in headcount to meet a growing study pipeline. But, they weren’t positioned to hire so many internal experts, and they lacked the capacity to design and manage vendor onboarding activities. They needed help recruiting, training, and onboarding talent so they could fill multiple niche roles and successfully scale their operations.

It’s challenging to find high-performing, ready-to-deploy technical talent who can familiarize themselves with the intricacies of a digital health platform's functionality within weeks. Typically, it takes 6-12 weeks for average talent in the digital health industry to learn how a platform functions in the context of clinical trial operations.

The Solution

At Studion, we provide a range of flexible partnership models from one or more individuals to fully-outsourced study design and deployment teams. Our experts can read a technical clinical study protocol, determine its unique software design requirements, and deliver on every function necessary to deploy the software for complex digital study designs.

We provide such expertise to to help quickly scale teams and operations and meet study timeline demands, using our repeatable, easy-to-follow process:

• We identify stakeholders and task owners at our partner’s organization.

• We align our expectations with theirs and define a reproducible process they can utilize even after the engagement.

• We spearhead change management and continuous improvement activities and track and monitor the progress of our staff augmentation.

• We hand off operations to our clients when they are stable.

When tasked with scaling headcount for our eClinical tech partner, we started by vetting each individual who would be placed in a unique role within our partner’s organization such that they were ready for the task at hand upon completing onboarding and training. Our experts’ familiarity with the eClinical tech provider’s platform functionality helped us streamline these processes and train the deployed team members for success working within these platforms. We also included people management in our flexible partnership offering, reducing the burden on our partner’s internal resources to manage these individuals.

The Impact

Within a year, we scaled our eClinical tech partner’s team from nine to 155 members for each unique role required to deliver eClinical software for study deployment. By scaling quickly, our partner utilized these experts to meet immediate study needs. We handled recruitment, onboarding, and training, providing our partner with qualified, ready-to-go talent, reducing the time they would have otherwise spent on these tasks, and making the entire undertaking cost-effective.

Studion also provided strategic consulting on how to achieve and sustain scalability. By leveraging Studion’s experience working with different sponsor platforms across pharma, eClinical tech companies and study sponsors can identify software development gaps, mitigate risks to delayed study milestones, and reduce cycle times. Our team’s expert understanding of the relationship between study requirements and eClinical software design instills confidence in our deliverables.