Clarkston’s life sciences experts attended the 2023 Veeva R&D and Quality Summit earlier this week in Boston, Massachusetts. The summit brought together peers and industry leaders across clinical, quality and manufacturing, regulatory, safety, and IT, to discuss the latest trends and topics shaping the future of the life sciences industry. Panels and discussions also centered around Veeva’s latest features and how to get the most out of your quality system investment. Clarkston’s LaToya Lee Jones, partner and quality and compliance lead, also spoke at the event as a featured panelist for “QC Transformation Best Practices.” Below, we outline key takeaways from the 2023 Veeva R&D and Quality Summit.

2023 Veeva R&D and Quality Summit Takeaways

1. A Focused and Practical Approach to AI

One of the key advantages that Veeva’s suite of offerings brings is its ability to centralize information across different functions within an organization. Over the last several years, Veeva has introduced artificial intelligence (AI) tools in its offerings that companies can take advantage of to gain greater long-term returns on these critical technology investments. At the Summit, Veeva said it is taking a “focused and practical approach” to artificial intelligence. They continue to roll out Application Bots for processes-specific work, like RIM Bot. RIM Bot is on the roadmap for regulatory and will join similarly named products such as TMF Bot and, in the commercial cloud, CRM Bot, which was announced earlier this year. As with any technology investment, developing and executing a change management strategy to bring the user community along is a key enabler of success. As you strive to optimize the process and technology, special attention needs to be paid to the people that will be using the new tools and changing their ways of working.

2. Vault Platform Enhancements

At a platform level, Veeva continues to iterate to reduce friction, enable faster insights, and increase uptime for a platform that has become a critical application for many life sciences companies – Veeva Vault. The Vault platform is getting a new feature called Action Layouts that can help simplify the layouts of data entry and review applications by admins to define the data needed for entry or visibility based on the task a given user is being asked to complete. 

Veeva plans to roll out what it is calling Direct Data API, which will allow for pulls of a customer’s vault dataset and incremental updates from the Vault Platform at a faster rate than the current API offering. This is being introduced as a way to help companies that want real-time access to their data for use cases, from data lakes to AI model training, using familiar API tools.

Customers welcomed the news that Veeva continues to make the automatic upgrade process more efficient. To increase uptime, the company said that it will be able to apply the final upgrade of 2023 in just 10 minutes. 

3. Veeva Product Announcements 

Veeva announced a few exciting and much-anticipated product updates within the Clinical, Quality, and Safety spaces:

Clinical: Veeva continues to evolve its offerings and introduced several new products across the Development Cloud. In the Clinical space, Veeva is focusing on collaboration for clinical operations and investing in Site Connect to provide a standardized platform for clinical sites across sponsors. They also announced Veeva OpenData Clinical, which will be available at the end of 2024. It’s modeled after a similar offering in the commercial cloud and aims to provide reference data about sites and investigators for trial sponsors integrated in to the TMF. In an effort to address the myriad logins clinical site personnel have to manage, the software vendor also introduced VeevaID. The SSO solution, planned for a December 2023 rollout, will allow site personnel to access their Veeva systems across all sponsors. It will be free and accessible for sites, sponsors, partners, and competitors of Veeva.

Quality: In the Quality space, Veeva announced Vault eForms, a solution that is intended to replace the forms and paperwork used on the manufacturing floor. And, slated for release in the second half of 2024 is a solution that many Veeva adopters have been waiting for – Vault Batch Release – which will integrate with SAP and will also work with any LIMS system. Clients have been waiting for batch release for some time, and we’re excited to see this moving forward.

Safety: Veeva is putting a renewed focus on and commitment to safety in the R&D and quality space in what they called a “Safety Strategic Partnership,” enabling a connected safety approach from clinical operations, through regulatory, through quality and manufacturing. At the Summit, Veeva announced two new offerings in the safety space: Workbench and Signal. These solutions require Vault Safety and are new solutions for analytics and signal detection. Veeva is evolving its safety solutions to be completely global and is working with key customers to enable safety for use in Japan within the next year. 

4. Holistic QC Transformation

Organizations must be proactive in their quality control (QC) strategy. Clarkston’s LaToya Lee Jones was a featured panelist at this year’s summit, speaking on some best practices for organizations looking to establish a digital transformation strategy that enables a strong end-to-end quality foundation. In recent years, we’ve seen companies prioritize paperless solutions and cloud-based platforms that allow for great cross-functional collaboration and data sharing/integration, such as Vault LIMS. There’s been a stronger focus on “total quality management” from end to end – QC teams, suppliers, and other value chain stakeholders. And data plays a key role in that collaboration. Historically, so much of quality as a function has been siloed, so naturally many of the tactical elements, like data, have followed suit. However, for more holistic QC transformation, businesses need to extend their QC integrations with the broader organization – and align their QC goals with larger business goals and objectives – to truly reap the benefits and ROI of your Veeva system. 

Looking Ahead 

So, what’s next for R&D, quality and compliance, and Veeva solutions? This year’s Summit – the largest R&D and Quality Summit to date – brought together more than 2,000 industry leaders and experts to engage, ideate, and collaborate. From strategies to maximize efficiencies in the clinical space, to the latest solution updates and offerings, to ensuring holistic QC transformation, the discussions and presentations were an energizing reminder of what lies ahead for the industry. 

To chat more about the 2023 Veeva R&D and Quality Summit or emerging trends in the Veeva space, reach out to one of our experts today.  

Contributions from Davida Rosenfeld