We work with a number of customers in India such as Clinigene, Novo Nordisk, Novartis, Wyeth, GSK Pharma, Ranbaxy, QED Pharma, and several others. We work with both global clients as well as Indian clinical research organisations.
The level of IT penetration in healthcare in India is still catching up.

Please share your views on the scope of growth of solutions like PheedIT in India.

PheedIT solution is a flagship product for clinical data management. IT penetration in healthcare in India is low, however, IT penetration within the clinical part of an organisation is extremely crucial because there is no other alternative for managing data. With IT, the entire process of data management and analysis is going to be extremely time consuming. SAS is already an able organisation that creates data in FDA format, which reduces the cycle time. Time is extremely important while launching a product in the market, as other drug manufacturers might be planning to launch a similar product in the market. The advantage that SAS offers is that it not only helps organisations in data management, but it also does high-end analytics, which is an integral part of launching a drug in the market.
 
Please share your experiences on the recent deployment of PheedIT at Clinigene.

Clinigene is a very valued customer of SAS and they use our solution PheedIT for complete end-to-end  clinical data management. When a drug goes through various processes of a trial cycle, a huge amount of data is generate, which needs to be analysed and this is the kind of challenge that Clinigene was facing and by deploying PheedIT, they have been able to overcome this challenge to a huge extent.  Other challenges that Clinigene was facing were patient recruitment and motivating patients to come back for clinical trials, how to manage data and how to use these results for deciding the launch cycle. With PheedIT, Clinigene not only reduced the trial time, but also overcome various other challenges attached to launching drugs in the market.

What is the approximate investment required to adopt your solutions?

The amount of investment depends upon what exactly the organisation wants, the stage at which they are and what exactly they want to do. Our team works with these organisations to analyse the amount of work required. We work with both aspirational organisations and organisations that have established themselves. So there is a value proposition of an emerging organisation and an established organisations.

What strategies do you follow to maintain your footprint in the health IT space?

Our focus has always been on the customer and we will continue to do that. This approach, we believe, will itself take care of the competition.

what are the major opportunities and growth prospects do you see in the Indian market?

A great opportunity is generating an enterprise-wide solution for health and life science customers. Another opportunity that we see is in the area of drug development and how our solutions get deployed for drug development processes. Third area is clinical data integration as a lot of data gets generated during various processes and how this data can be integrated for analysis.

what are the major challenges in the field?

We have been fortunate enough to not encounter any major challenges. But some of the basic problem faced is the culture of the organisation, which is extremely important. Converting a manual process to an automated process is difficult and requires some amount of cultural change. Secondly, maintaining the quality of data is a challenge and thirdly, the source in which the data exists may pose some difficulties, but all these can be overcome.

What is the importance of regulatory standards in this space?

There are various global regulatory bodies and all the pharma companies are following the standards laid by these bodies. There is FDA and CDISC—which looks into the technological aspect and ensures that the clinical data provided is in the right format. These bodies on the whole ensure that the data provided is accurate enough to be used for drug development. Best part about SAS is that whatever we do is compliant with the standards laid by all these regulatory bodies.

What are your plans for future growth?

We plan to keep the right focus with customers and offer the kind of analytics that can benefit our customers. We want to help our clients in their journey towards embracing our solutions.