India's IT providers must become experts to handle biostatistics boom, says Alticure
The firm’s MD and CEO Kannan Janakiraman contacted Outsourcing-Pharma.com over a recent report on Beroe’s view for the biostatistics outsourcing market in the country.
The analysis found that more firms are working with providers – IT enabled services and business process outsourcing (ITES/BPO) firms – because it is more “cost effective” than working in the West.
Janakiraman however, said ITES and BPOs have so far failed to deliver the outsourcing needs in biostatistics and data management because of a lack of domain expertise and understanding of development needs.
He told us that if something does not change in the near future, many of the firms outsourcing their IT needs to those providers could run into trouble.
“We should keep in mind that Biostatistics and data managment needs cannot be met by employing Information technology and software tools only,” he said. “Instead it requires substantial domain knowledge in drug and device development science.”
Janakiraman told us that there is a way to fix the problems before it’s too late – by hiring team leaders with knowledge of the upstream process.
He said a smaller more expert team would be hugely more useful than having large unskilled group of workers, saying “they should come out of the ‘celebrity syndrome’ of being big and forming teams overnight.”
Working more with the sponsor as an equal partner was also on his action list.
“The current trend and future of Outsourcing of research and development programmes is based upon the accessibility of such expertise and reducing time not just on reducing cost,” he said.
