2024 Veeva R&D and Quality Summit: Bree Burks of Veeva Discusses Site-Sponsor Relationships

ACT: To get started, could you give us an overview of your focus area at Veeva?

Burks: I have the pleasure of focusing on research sites at Veeva, and we are currently a small and mighty part of the Veeva ecosystem. I focus on strategy for our sites and really thinking about the way that they engage with our technology overall. We also make an application called SiteVault, which is a core business application that they work on and choose all on their own. Sites are what I eat, breathe, and sleep at Veeva.

ACT: You started your journey into clinical trials as an RN in an emergency room and moved into clinical trials to try and help more patients. That significantly shaped your career. What was your experience like and why did you get into software?

Burks: Well, it certainly was an accident. My experience was really, I think why so many people get into healthcare is just wanting to help people, and it seemed obvious like a nurse would be a great way to do that. I look back very fondly on my nursing career, but it certainly came with a big set of challenges and one of the challenges was just feeling like you want to do more for your patients. How can I give more than what we offer? Clinical trials got on my radar as a way to give them access to novel therapies. I had an opportunity to run larger sites and think this is so cool to be in an academic medical center, and we're supporting our community with all this access to the latest and the greatest, but it started breaking down for me when technology started becoming more and more a part of the trial, which is interesting, because now I'm at a technology company. The thought was this technology is actually making it harder and eventually I thought I want to go talk to some of these technology companies—and there was a sea of them—and Veeva was part of that for me. Lo and behold, now I'm working at this company, so certainly not where I would have told you I would have been 10 years ago, but I really love what I get to do today.

ACT: At Veeva R&D and Quality Summit, one of the big themes is streamlining collaboration between sponsors and sites. Veeva recently announced major upgrades to its Site Connect product, so could you tell us what problem it is trying to solve and why this is important for the industry?

Burks: If you think about marketplaces and your day-to-day world, maybe Amazon, or I like to go on Etsy, and find all the creatives. It's so fun for me to get to go to one place and then be able to get access to all the things in a very standard way. If you think about the way that sites work, they don't have anything like that, but they are working across their shared resource, working across all of these different sponsors, which means every time they engage in a trial, it looks different, it feels different. They need training on it. They're logging into it in a different way. I like this saying of variation is the enemy of quality, and it is if you're trying to get to the same end, but you're doing it a million different ways. That is kind of chaotic, and it's really the last thing that sites need. They need to be in front of their patients. They need to be focusing on the science. They need to be keeping those patients informed and safe. The reason why Site Connect is so important is it's bringing that consistency to the first time for these research sites, where they can engage across sponsors in a very standard way. It's unique for us at Veeva because it's not customizable, like a lot of the things that we've done in the past, where we really wanted to make the customer happy and tailor things to them, but a site is this shared resource—I call them a hub of information exchange. The way that we can really help their life is across all these sponsors, consistency, and Site Connect is the way that we're doing that at Veeva. And I'm very excited about it.

ACT: One important aspect happening at Summit this week is bringing together sponsors and research sites to connect and learn from each other. What can biopharmas do to work better with research sites?

Burks: I still think we're at a very foundational place where they need to be able to talk to each other more. It's funny, this is top of mind because I just came from a workshop where we were just doing this, and we had these amazing leaders at pharma companies sitting with leaders of research sites and hospitals that focus on research, and just opening up that line of communication, I think is almost where we're at right now. I think that there is such a willingness to work better together and not necessarily an opportunity to figure out now how do we actually apply that? That's something for me at Summit that I'm really excited about. We've set up a lot of opportunities this year to actually create meaningful engagement where we can allow them to start understanding the other side, and then we can start to build solutions for some of the challenges that they're experiencing. I think again, we're just really at the foundational level of let's get the right people talking.

ACT: One of the ongoing challenges in the industry is a shortage of talent executing clinical trials. What advice would you give sponsors to help make a research site a great place to work?

Burks: I love that question. I would say again, it is maddening doing the same thing, or trying to come to the same outcome a whole lot of different ways, so sponsors actually working better together and saying we can execute trials more seamlessly if we are using platforms to get the work done, and if we're listening to the sites, and we're trying to decrease variation, and we're talking to one another instead of just living in our own—only thinking about our own trials, or thinking that sites are just working with sponsor ‘A’ and in decreasing that chaos and bringing more consistency, actually in the way sponsors work as a whole, is going to make the site's life a lot easier. There's actually newer data now that's really showing that sites are leaving somewhat because of the technology burden, the technology overload, and just thinking about things like if you had 10 different email accounts, I'm still just emailing, but they're set up differently, you have different passwords to get in them. You can't prioritize across these email accounts. That's a small example of what a research site goes through to get their work done, so we really need some more consistency, and sponsors working together will bring that.