Healthcare Company Expects Online Collaboration To Save Millions Of Euros

Sanofi is a multinational pharmaceutical company engaged in the research and development, manufacturing, and marketing of prescription drugs, vaccines, and over-the-counter healthcare products. Sanofi relied on time-consuming, paper-based processes to manage global drug trials. To introduce efficiencies and reduce costs, sanofi deployed a digitalized version of its previous method. Called the Clinical Trial Portal, the solution is based on the Clinical Portal solution from NextDocs that uses Microsoft portal, collaboration, and content management technologies. The new solution will accelerate time-to-market for new drug therapies and is expected to save an estimated 10,000 working days—costing €6.4M (U.S.$9M) in time wasted managing documents—when it is deployed to more than 3,000 internal and 40,000 external stakeholders over the next few years.

Sanofi has an extensive portfolio of prescription drugs, vaccines, generics, and consumer healthcare products targeting traditional markets and emerging countries. Sanofi addresses fundamental health issues and makes major therapeutic solutions available in its areas of expertise: oncology, diabetes, thrombotic and cardiovascular diseases, and central nervous system disorders. Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines division of sanofi, offers vaccines protecting against 20 infectious diseases. Sales in 2010 for sanofi were €30,384M (U.S. $43,967M).

To enable its strategic goals and build a more agile, adaptable organization, sanofi is improving efficiencies in its key business processes. The company began by focusing on how it brings its drugs to market. For sanofi, bringing a drug to market is a multiyear, complex process of global proportions. Expediting this process depends on the successful completion of clinical drug trials. At any given time, the company has dozens of trials in progress. For any trial, sanofi international clinical trial managers (CTMs) could be collaborating with affiliate hospitals or health facilities in as many as 50 countries, where clinical research associates (CRAs) at hundreds of local sites manage trial data from primary investigators, or physicians, administering the drug to many thousands of patients.