The Lettuce of eClinical

So I was looking at a lettuce the other day… bear with me, it will make sense in the end.

I realised that what I saw and what everyone else saw when they looked at a lettuce was a tight ball of green stuff that you put in a salad.

But what we didn’t think about was that that’s not what a lettuce is at all. They get picked when they’re young so they never get the chance to unfold their leaves and look like a plant, not a green ball. They have flowers which I’ve never seen and seeds and an ecosystem. It’s not as though they always grew in neat rows on farms. Maybe they were from the jungle or from the Sahara. I’ve honestly got no idea.

It was only by looking at the lettuce in a different way that I realised that it wasn’t just green stuff you put in salad.

Why am I writing about this?

I think that the eClincial industry today allows the same thing. It allows clinical trials to be looked at from a new angle. To be examined in new ways so that everyone involved can see new opportunities that didn’t exist even a few years ago.

I think we’re obliged to find new and better ways to do things, to explore what’s possible and create products that are really special, because to me, this is the first time it can be done. This isn’t the beginning of eClincial but I think that the opportunities afforded by the technologies available today, whether it’s cloud based programs or using home based tools to keep track of subjects, deserve to be taken advantage of.

Some people might call that eClinical 2.0, some might call it a lettuce. As long as it gets done.