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EmVenio Research delivers localized trial access to diverse and underserved communities and is laser-focused on changing the face of clinical trial participation via a unique intersection of tech-enabled, community-based mobile research sites, home and virtual visits. Thoughtful cultural approaches and accommodations respectfully meet trial participants where they are — facilitating more inclusive and representative research and data for their pharma and life sciences clients.
Today, diverse populations are frequently underrepresented in clinical trials and medical research across the globe. EmVenio provides an innovative, sustainable solution for delivering those communities trials – expanding access to the most advanced treatments and technologies for chronic and critical illness and ensuring that statistical analysis reflects the full spectrum of public diversity. The organization’s approach focuses on localizing clinical trials by establishing mobile research sites in densely populated urban areas, suburban neighborhoods and rural regions, as well as local staffing models that reflect cultural and linguistic characteristics. Through its Community Research Sites and Home and Virtual Visit offerings, EmVenio has doubled the number of minority participants in clinical trials compared to the industry average.
They will soon be expanding from their US roots to address the same issues of diversity in clinical studies across the globe.
The Challenge
When Bill Swavely accepted the role at EmVenio, he knew he had a challenge ahead of him. The organization was a 100% distributed virtual workforce — comprised of both corporate and field-based personnel. To compound matters, the team had a powerful but ambitious vision for a technology platform that could help facilitate both workflow and data analytics for innumerable pharma and biotech studies across the nation, and ultimately across the globe.
However, the nature of clinical trials dictates the exchange of highly sensitive PHI via frictionless applications. “I always say that when technology is done right, it disappears,” Bill said. “I want patients to feel enabled and connected — so it’s as easy as possible for them to participate.” EmVenio’s lean development team would need to find a way to build an optimized, compliant Microsoft Azure-based cloud environment to submit both their commercial application and their distributed employee infrastructure — without slowing time-to-market.
The Solution
As soon as he accepted the job offer at EmVenio, Bill surmised that the combination of complex business analytics functions and supporting a fully remote workforce required a robust, efficient cloud strategy — and a highly specialized managed services partner that was steeped in healthcare, cloud, and cyber defense. Having worked with ClearDATA at a previous employer, Bill immediately picked up the phone and got the ball rolling, engaging the company to secure the entire greenfield Azure Cloud enterprise from day one
With a virtual, distributed workforce and mobile sites spread geographically from coast to coast, every facet of EmVenio’s IT infrastructure requires stable, scalable, secure cloud infrastructure to support both patients and employees. Moreover, the company’s ambition to sell their solution into pharmaceutical and medical device organizations required demonstration of the highest levels of validated security and compliance measures — including SOC 2 and HITRUST. The prospect of pursuing such certifications without a specialized partner would require time and money — and would add some measure of delay to their go-to-market aspirations.
To address these challenges, Bill and EmVenio engaged ClearDATA from inception, leveraging their Managed Health Cloud and engaging frequent expert consultation to ensure that their complex Azure Cloud infrastructure was secure from the outset and stayed secure. As a relative startup, EmVenio opted to build on a single cloud for the purposes of efficiency and scope/cost control — optimizing for the data and analytics platform they were rolling out to support the collection of patient datapoints nationwide — and ultimately around the globe. Their use of Microsoft SQL and enterprise data warehouses, coupled with DevOps capabilities to add bespoke elements gave them the flexibility they needed for scaling rapidly up and down with new studies and new clinical sites.
“Azure has secure facilities and capabilities,” said Bill. “Add that to my partnership with ClearDATA and I can sleep easy. We have the benefit of building this cloud-native environment from scratch exactly the way we want to, so we have all the history and there should be no inherited issues or surprises.”
The Results
By capitalizing on ClearDATA’s automation, expertise and certifications, EmVenio was able to ensure compliance, facilitate more seamless audits and security discussions with prospective pharma and life sciences clients, and safeguard a virtually unlimited store of patient data and analytics. Their capacity to impact evolving treatment opportunities scaled dramatically.
In under a year, the company has been able to double the minority representation among clinical study participants nationwide.
It’s just the tip of the iceberg for this mission-driven organization. “We are expanding globally as soon as it’s feasible,” said Bill. “You look around the world and regardless of what the population looks like, everyone has the same issues surrounding a lack of inclusivity and representation in their data. We have the mechanism and the resolve to solve that. And we will.”
