Philadelphia’s Phoenix Data Systems (PDS), founded in 1997, has assisted on 400 clinical trials. It offers electronic data capture (EDC), interactive voice response (IVR) and electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePRO). In talking to the company over the years, we’ve always felt they were careful to avoid marketing hype. 

A few weeks back, the company announced new contract wins from six previous clients as well as eleven new companies. That added up to $5.8 million in bookings. There were an impressive four pivotal Phase III trials in the mix. The firm reported a record $9.5 million in bookings in the fourth quarter of 2006. Bookings, of course, may have any number of definitions for privately held firms like PDS.

The surge, in short, is as robust as what is happening in rest of the EDC landscape. “We’ve actually been able to modulate the growth so that we can continue to maintain our control and quality,” says William Claypool, the company’s CEO. He says the company now has 80 employees.

Low-Key Company

“We have to make money and maintain the quality for our current clients,” Claypool says. “We don’t view this as a land grab, unlike some of our competitors. We view this as a relationship model. We partner with our clients and want to maintain them forever.”

The company’s sweet spot, he says, is small to mid-sized pharmas: “They have a need for speed, for a lot of customer service. We are really focused on service. We view ourselves as at least as much of a service company as a technology.”

Claypool says that the company can handle all major phases of trials, with no especially strong growth in any one segment. The company is efficient enough to think that even Phase I is a good opportunity to put its technology to work. “We are very comfortable there,” Claypool says.

Supporting Adaptive Trials

The company’s VP of sales and marketing, Stephen Boccardo, notes that Phoenix Data Systems is very much involved in helping customers plan some of the simplest approaches to adaptive trials, dose-response studies. The company is very comfortable supporting adaptive designs with its platform. “There is a universal opinion out there—the only way for adaptive trials to work is to use EDC and have access to data in real time,” Boccardo says.

The PDS system has multiple technologies that all hit the same database. “It talks to the same database using the same components,” says Sam Hume, who was VP of technical operations at PDS when we interviewed him. (He’s since moved on to be senior principal information architect at Astra-Zeneca.) In adaptive studies, having the EDC system already connected to the IVR system is an advantage, eliminating the need to connect the systems or reconcile data between them. It’s a capability that a small number of technology companies are either actively exploring or already delivering.

Over the years, like any EDC firm, PDS has learned to guess which consultancy is helping a customer based on the questions posed. But as time passes, more customers are dispensing with that formality, Boccardo says: “We see a lot of studies where there is no request for proposal (RFP). Most people are just accepting EDC as ‘we’re going to do EDC for this trial. Send us your proposal on what you do well.’ That’s nice in not having to go through a tedious and long RFP process.”

General Acceptance

Fewer sponsors are considering paper or electronic-paper hybrid studies, he says. “We’ve seen a definite increase where EDC is a requirement and paper isn’t an option,” Boccardo notes.

At the end of the day, Boccardo insists, the company is a bit gentler on its pricing, and that has lead to greater customer retention. Says Boccardo: “It’s a fixed price model plus ongoing support. It holds true to our customers. It’s very easy for them to understand. They love that model. What customers want is good value and predictability in their budgeting.”

Paradoxically, he says, the growth in the EDC market has not been wholly good. EDC itself is more established. But the ability to deliver services uniformly to all customers remains an open issue for some of PDS’s larger competitors, he believes. “The technology is less an issue,” Boccardo says. “The complaint customers have now is with customer service and whether their provider is being responsive. It’s very difficult for companies that are growing very quickly to keep their eye on the ball of what got them there.”