I recently returned from more than three weeks on the road visiting seven prospects, meeting three customers, giving Grand Rounds at the FDA, meeting with four growth equity investors, and speaking three times at conferences for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Between trips I spent quite a bit of time with my only grandson in Washington, DC.
A chance to get away is always refreshing since it represents a concentrated opportunity to present our value proposition and receive immediate feedback. When I am working at the office in Salt Lake City it is too easy to talk among ourselves and devise a solution to a problem that may not even exist.
Over the next few days I’d like to share some of my takeaways and observations from my recent road trip that might be insightful for others.
REGISTRIES STILL NOT CLEARLY DEFINED AND UNDERSTOOD
I met several high-level prospects who do not understand what the term “registry” means. When I say a registry is a “purpose-specific database” that is more enlightening but still not universally understood. As a result of this ambiguity, it seems many people believe “registry” is the term often used for a simple list of four or five characteristics of each patient. Yet, it is also used to describe a complex aggregation of data from 30 sources that represent a complete longitudinal picture of a research subject over a long period of time.
The situation reminds me of when I first started with Oracle, in 1982. In those days the term “relational database” was equally ill defined and therefore ill understood. My initial customers had trouble understanding why Oracle and Dbase were both relational databases even though one cost $1,000 and the other cost $100,000. We tried arguing the point that Oracle was “really relational,” or that we met Codd’s definition of relational but no one cared about that. The only people who really appreciated the difference were the customers who opted for Dbase, spent more than $100,000 trying to get it to work and then ended up scrapping the project and spending another $100,000 to purchase Oracle.
I wonder how long it will take our industry to understand the difference between a toy registry like Excel and a real registry from Remedy Informatics?
I will share more thoughts in my next post.
-Gary
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