State Department recognizes CliniOps’s role in transforming digital med tech
Ritu Jha
Avik Pal was comfortable in IT until he got involved in 2012 with iKure, a project in India connecting rural patients with urban doctors. He was intrigued by the logistical nightmare involved in organization and documentation, an interest only spurred by his participation as a healthy patient in clinical trials organized by his wife, Reshmi Pal, a physician and researcher.
Now CliniOps, Inc, the award-winning company that he co-founded with Yerramalli Subramaniam, has been selected by the US State Department to represent the US at the upcoming Global Entrepreneurship Summit 2017, to be held in Hyderabad, November 28 through 30.
CliniOps, Inc is a tablet-based platform to electronically source, monitor and engage with patients involved in clinical trials. Besides, it also offers statistical programming and clinical data management services. Because CliniOps addresses problems not limited to the developed world, its solutions also allow for spotty Internet access in remote areas.
In its own words, CliniOps is focused on “transforming the way clinical trials are conducted, by innovative eSource solution, leveraging SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud) to the Life Sciences industry.”
The upcoming summit – with the theme Women First, Prosperity for All – will focus on four innovative, high-growth industries: healthcare and life sciences; the digital economy and financial technology; energy and infrastructure; and media and entertainment.
Ivanka Trump, President Trump’s daughter and White House advisor, will lead the US delegation.
Given Pal’s interest in global health issues and social entrepreneurship, being accepted for the event is encouraging.
“I’m looking forward to immerse three days of networking, mentoring and workshops and to meet inspiring entrepreneurs from over 140 countries,” he said. “I hope we can create some long-lasting memories and build relationships.”
Pal graduated from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (junior to Google CEO Sundar Pichai), and came to US in 1999 to pursue an MBA at the University of San Francisco, California.
Pal told indica, “Our goal is to help biopharma companies bring drugs faster to the market, relying on high data quality and less cost. Our eSource solution eliminates several inefficiencies and manual processes from the clinical trial workflow, and streamlines the data collection, data analytics and data submission processes.”
He said the aim was to work with reputed American universities and global foundations conducting clinical research and global health studies around the world, including in very resource-poor countries across Africa, Asia and South America.
“Clinical trials are complex, time consuming and extremely costly,” Pal said. “It takes more than $2 billion and over a decade to bring a new drug to market and CliniOps, is trying to solve this problem through a digital transformation.”
Recognition of its value to the industry came this year in the form of the Frost and Sullivan 2017 North American Digitalization of Clinical Trials Technology Leadership Award.
Pal spoke about how his experiences at iKure and being a subject in clinical trials transformed his understanding of the area.
“The more I learned about the challenges in the process, the more convinced I was to try and solve the problem,” Pal said. He added it took two years of team work to ensure that clinical trials could be organized faster, patients monitored better even if they were not easy to connect with, and to engage with subjects to keep them on board.
