In a high-stakes industry like the biomedical field, there’s a lot of pressure to bring the latest life-saving medical innovations to market. Especially for startups that may have big ideas but may have even bigger shoes to fill. 

After funding is secured, teams are assembled, and it’s time to hit the ground running with clinical trials that can make or break your business. As anyone who has run a successful clinical trial knows, unexpected delays happen. You can plan for the expected ones, but what about when something as simple as your IT gets in the way of bringing that life-saving solution to market?

This isn’t unheard of. Actually, it’s quite common. How can you streamline operations, create efficient workflows, and ensure that your IT doesn’t get in the way of a successful clinical trial? 

In this blog, we’re going to explore how DevOps can help biomedical startups overcome clinical trial bottlenecks and deliver your revolutionary product faster.

What is DevOps, and why is it so important?

For non-IT folk, understanding DevOps can feel like working on a puzzle where one piece is missing. Confusing, frustrating, and–well, annoying.

Let’s make this easy: DevOps is a system that bridges the gap between your development team and your operations team. If R&D is like the scientists designing the formula for your groundbreaking product, operations is like the production team manufacturing it to R&D’s specifications.

When these two teams aren’t working well together, you might end up with a formula that the production team doesn’t have the resources to create. On the other hand, production might misinterpret the design and produce something that doesn’t meet the intended specifications.

In IT terms, your developers create the software and systems that power your clinical trials, and your operations team ensures these systems are deployed, scalable, and compliant with industry regulations. If your development and operations teams aren’t communicating well, you could end up with technology that may not be able to scale and is pockmarked with vulnerabilities.

In the worst case scenario, you might face catastrophic issues like losing critical research data or experiencing system failures that affect your regulatory compliance. This is where strong DevOps strategies save the day. It streamlines your processes, without the unnecessary roadblocks so that you can finish your clinical trial on time.

Faster clinical trials, better outcomes

Healthcare moves like molasses. This fact is frustrating for biomedical startups that have life-saving ideas but have to move through an antiquated space to get to the outcomes. You don’t have a whole lot of control over how quickly your solution can hit the market, but one area that you can control is your IT. 

Time is critical in biomedical innovation and clinical trials. DevOps can help you deliver faster results. 

How DevOps speeds up trials

Automation: Break through bottlenecks and automate complex workflows. From streamlining data analysis pipelines to setting up and managing testing environments, automation speeds up processes while significantly reducing human error.

Real-time collaboration: Great communication across teams is essential in a clinical trial. DevOps helps break down silos and accelerates decision-making while creating alignment between R&D, data science, and operations teams. 

Scalability: Want to expand your clinical trial? You need to harness the power of the cloud to manage expanding datasets and trial operations without lag. Scale your resources to meet the demands of each trial phase without sacrificing manpower. 

While a strong DevOps strategy is great for achieving a more streamlined and efficient clinical trial process, it can actually serve as a self-inflating life preserver, protecting your business from digital disasters and vulnerabilities.

Always resilient, always compliant

In the biomedical field, regulatory scrutiny, data sensitivity, and compliance are everything. Without a solid DevOps foundation, your business is standing on a house of cards. All it takes is one to fail and the whole structure tumbles.
The challenge is that during clinical trials, you may not have the resources to constantly monitor this trifecta. But you can’t just shrug your shoulders and hope for the best, especially when non-compliance isn’t just a hiccup, it’s a serious risk that can lead to fines, delays, and potentially irreparable damage.

How strong DevOps keeps you compliant and resilient

Automated compliance checks: The best part about a robust DevOps strategy is that you can integrate compliance checks directly into your development pipelines to identify potential issues early enough to be fixed.

Disaster recovery plans: Protect your clinical trial data with automated backup and recovery processes so that if the unthinkable happens, you have a reliable way to get your data back and continue your clinical trial.

High-availability (HA) systems: Meet the demands of every stage of your clinical trial and minimize downtime with robust infrastructure that’s designed to keep your operations running smoothly, even under pressure.

Now that you have a pretty good understanding of why strong DevOps is essential for biomedical startups entering a clinical trial, let’s talk about how to find the perfect strategy for your business.

You need a tailored approach

In the fast paced world of biomedical research, a one-size fits all approach just won’t cut it. Your IT needs are as unique as your groundbreaking innovations and your DevOps strategy should reflect that.

At NTS, we believe that custom is best. This is why we always begin our DevOps strategy with one core component: understanding.

Before creating your DevOps plan, we dive into your goals, your challenges, and current processes. We then align our solutions with your unique needs in order to fit seamlessly into your IT and set you up for clinical trial success.

We like to take things a step further by breaking down development into smaller, more manageable steps, so that quality is never compromised. Through continuous optimization, we magnify every detail–whether it’s improving data pipelines, refining testing workflows, or scaling your clinical trial–to ensure that you never have to worry about the backend, because we have your bases covered.

Ready to streamline your next clinical trial and get your lifesaving solution to market faster? Contact us today.