Little is known. But what’s there is tantalizing. Parexel International has offered to buy ClinPhone. ClinPhone has rebuffed the overture for now. Matters may go no farther. A merger of the two firms, now hypothetical, would change the conventional wisdom about how services and technologies should be combined in clinical trials. A combination of Parexel and ClinPhone would join two top solutions for interactive voice response (IVR) systems. It would fill a notable gap in the software portfolio of Parexel’s Perceptive Informatics division, which holds the top clinical trial management system (CTMS) but lacks an electronic data capture (EDC) solution. Entry Point ClinPhone, for those new to the party, is the world’s top IVR firm, with (last time we asked) 750 employees. The company often has hundreds of trials ongoing at once (at perhaps $175,000 per trial). It has also been buying or internally developing a CTMS, an EDC system and…more...