12 Ways An EDC System Totally Changed My Life

By James Kahl, Director of Business Development, Merge eClinical

My career started in clinical research. I was formerly a Study Manager and a Data Manager for a large medical device company. In the early days, we used carbon-based CRFs. We’d manage discrepancies by communicating through fax. Randomizations would be through a batch of envelopes sent to the sites. Inevitably, they’d open the wrong envelope, get the wrong randomization assignment, and you’d scramble to correct things. It was a mess, but that’s how things were run back in the day.

The industry has definitely evolved from those days. I had worked with a number of EDC systems prior to seeing eClinicalOS (eCOS), and they were always underwhelming. I even asked a brilliant technical friend why he didn’t build an EDC system himself. He admitted it was just too daunting. It wasn’t until I saw a demo of eCOS that I saw the future of EDC. The features and functionalities hit on all the pain points I felt while running my clinical trials. I knew right away that the system would make my life easier in so many ways. When I sat down to add them up, I identified 12 key areas where a Data Manager’s job could be vastly improved.