Life sciences companies shifting away from traditional document management systems to emerging ECC solutions

Virtify, Inc., today announced the availability of a new IDC Health Insights study titled "Managing Paper at Its Roots: Extending Beyond Document Management to Enterprise Content Compliance." The new IDC Health Insights study, which was commissioned by Virtify, shows a growing trend in the life sciences industry away from traditional document management systems to emerging Enterprise Content Compliance (ECC) solutions. ECC solutions are changing and accelerating regulatory document preparation by enabling Parallel Authoring™ while automating the expanding regulatory compliance requirements surrounding submissions, labeling, and clinical trial disclosure.

The IDC Health Insights research states that the cost of bringing new drugs to market ranges from $800 million to $1.2 billion, and estimates that roughly a quarter of the cost comes from the content requirements associated with working in a regulatory compliant environment. The IDC Health Insights research also suggests that ECC solutions can substantially reduce the time and cost of bringing new drugs to market through improved abilities to manage collaborative teams, and compress the time spent authoring, reviewing, and submitting regulatory documents.

Over and above traditional document or content management systems, ECC solutions deliver advanced capabilities for Parallel Authoring which greatly improves the integration of key people and processes.  In doing so, ECC solutions reduce costs, time, and regulatory risk far above traditional manual or document –driven processes.

The new IDC Health Insights study is available on the Virtify website here www.virtify.com/idcreport and outlines:

• The latest technology and content management trends based on comprehensive survey research and interviews with dozens of life sciences professionals
• The evolution of "Enterprise Content Compliance" solutions and why they are quickly becoming a "transformative approach" to information management
• How today's structured content solutions are moving beyond traditional "collaboration" to next generation Parallel Authoring to compress timelines, reduce costs, and better integrate people and processes
• How ECC solutions deliver rapid ROI and promote user adoption through intuitive word-processor interfaces and out-of-the-box compliance with new and evolving global standards
• The cost advantages of a content-centric versus document-centric approach to regulatory submissions and compliance  
• Why the ability to identify and reuse key data elements is a critical requirement in creating additional and accurate regulatory documents (SOP, quality, validation, manufacturing)

"By combining capabilities for centralized content collaboration and reuse within a standards-based environment, ECC solutions, with a focus on content reuse is core to eliminating a significant amount of repetitious, low value, document-centric labor, therefore freeing up staff for more important efforts," noted Dr. Alan Louie, research director for IDC's Health Insights.

"This study clearly shows that life sciences companies are shifting away from traditional paper-based processes and legacy document management systems towards solutions that promote content reuse, resource efficiencies, and cost reductions," said Satish Tadikonda, President and CEO of Virtify. "With ECC solutions such as Virtify's, life sciences companies can leverage a unified platform to effectively manage regulatory content, compliance, and the many critical processes that are required across the complete product continuum."