From the Lab Bench to the Patient Chair

Seeing Clinical Research from Every Side

Maria Axetun, Manager Study Build and Project Management, Viedoc

I trained as a biomedical scientist, which meant I spent my early career at the bench, not behind a screen. I loved the science, but I found myself pulled toward a different kind of problem: not what the data said, but whether the data could be trusted to say anything at all. That pull took me to an academic research organization, where I worked as a data manager across a wide range of trials. From there I moved into project management at a CRO, overseeing medical writing, statistics, and data management for teams who were, every day, trying to make imperfect systems behave.

Roughly ten years ago, I started working with Viedoc as a customer, before I ever imagined joining the company as an employee. Then six years ago I did just that, first as a Product Specialist and now leading the project management and study build team responsible for delivering customer projects. I've evaluated trial technology from nearly every angle a person can: as the one keying in queries at 6pm, as the one designing the system other data managers would have to live inside, and, more recently, as a patient enrolled in a clinical trial that happened to run on the platform I help build.

An unplanned view from the other side of the desk 

That last one wasn't planned. I have a condition that led me to enroll in a clinical trial at a local university hospital, and the study happened to be using Viedoc. I didn't say anything to the site staff about where I work. I just watched them use it, the way any site user would, and listened to what they said about it unprompted. They were positive about how easy it was to navigate and how quickly they could see exactly where the study stood. That's a small thing to notice as a patient, but it isn't small to a site coordinator managing a dozen protocols, and it isn't small to me, because it confirmed something I'd believed from the data manager's side for years: sites tend to reach for platforms like ours for regulated pharma trials, and for something lighter when the stakes and the scrutiny are lower. That choice is a vote of confidence, and it's one I got to watch happen from the other side of the desk.

One platform, and a team that owns its trial

What struck me, sitting in both chairs, is that the thing I valued most as a data manager is the same thing that made the site staff's job easier as participants in that trial: everything lives in one platform. Not a workaround stitched between four systems, not a login for this and an export for that. One place to configure a study, collect the data, and see its state at a glance. When I say “configure,” I mean something specific: a study team can set up their own data collection and study design to fit how they actually work, and they can set up randomization and organization on their own, without waiting on a specialist to do it for them. That independence is what flexibility means in practice. It's the difference between a team that owns its trial and a team that's waiting on someone else's calendar.

Good people make good technology

None of that happens because software is clever on its own. It happens because good people build and support it, which is why I've become genuinely fond of a phrase that came up in a conversation recently: good people make good technology. There's a Swedish instinct behind that, the same one behind Volvo's obsession with safety or IKEA's insistence that good design should be usable by everyone, not just the people who can afford to hire someone else to assemble it. Sturdy, honest, built to actually be used. That's the standard I hold my own team to, and it's the reason we're now formalizing something that used to happen informally: real study build services and a new design review offering that give sponsors and CROs a packaged way to get expert eyes on their setup instead of hoping they configured it right the first time. The platform can be as flexible as we want it to be. What our clients actually need, just as much, is people who've done this hundreds of times helping them use it well.

I don't think I would trust any of this as fully as I do if I'd only ever seen it from one seat. But I've been the data manager staring at a query queue and the patient in the waiting room watching a coordinator pull up my study in seconds. All three of those people were looking for the same thing: a system that gets out of the way so the real work, the science, the care, the trial itself, can get done.