Driving Transformation With a Connected Clinical Platform: 2025 Veeva R&D and Quality Summit Clinical Opening Keynote

In the opening keynote of the clinical operations zone, Jim Reilly, president, Development Cloud, and EVP, global strategy, Veeva; and Jennifer Sheller, senior vice president, head of global clinical trial operations, Merck, highlighted how Veeva’s clinical platform can streamline critical processes for sponsors/contract research organizations (CROs), research sites, and patients.

Driving efficiency with a connected platform

“What a unique opportunity, and I wanted to make sure that we realized the gravity of that. And also recognize that we have this wonderful opportunity to connect and exchange ideas in the spirit of thinking about that one clinical mission,” Reilly said. “I'm really excited to share with you some of the things that Veeva is doing.”

Reilly explained that Veeva’s approach to streamlining and making clinical trials more efficient is based on tearing down departmental blockers that exist between operations and data management.

“We want to help tear that down by providing a complete and connected platform that delivers the tooling you need to get to the outcome you're after,” he said.

Driving efficiency with a connected platform

Veeva’s goal with its clinical platform is to reduce study effort and cost by at least 20%. Based on consumer data, the company has already seen positive outcomes, including:

• reducing document processing costs in trial master file (TMF) by as much as 40%,
• reducing monitoring costs by 30%, and
• reducing study build time for electronic data capture (EDC) by 50%.

Addressing site and patient needs

The company is also focused on improving the experiences of sites and patients. Reilly highlighted findings from a recent survey that was sent out to 10,000 site leaders. While the findings were not surprising, sites reinforced:

• financials getting paid on time is still a big problem,
• there are still too many logins and systems,
• there are still getting too many redundant requests for information,
• there is an inconsistent experience getting through vendor software, and
• they don't have as much of a voice on study design, feeling as though protocols are unnecessarily complex.

Regardless of the sponsor(s) the site is working with, Veeva’s platform provides sites with a standard application that maintains a consistent experience. Similarly, Veeva’s “One App” approach for patients and clinicians revolves around providing an application that maintains consistency regardless of the technology they are using—mobile app, iPad, or on a computer.

"This is what we really want to focus on, by providing the very best experience that we can make possible, whether you're a sponsor/CRO, whether you're a site, and certainly for the patients. Giving them all the very best experience,” Reilly said. “And that is a labor of love."

Merck’s Zero Gravity program

Following Reilly’s portion of the keynote, Sheller gave an overview of Merck’s journey in streamlining clinical operations with the use of Veeva Clinical Platform.

“Developing lifesaving medicines and vaccines is hard work,” Sheller said. “It's one of the most time consuming, time intensive, costly, complex, expensive undertakings in modern science, and it's becoming more complex.”

Merck’s program to modernize its clinical trials, “Zero Gravity,” aims to streamline operations by shifting from a fragmented, heavily customized technology landscape to a unified, integrated platform in partnership with Veeva.

Zero Gravity began with early adopter studies through Phase I trials, then moving to more complex studies. Following was a large-scale migration of all studies into Veeva CTMS and other modules.

Early operational improvements

The pharma company has already seen improvements. Sheller highlighted gains in trial setup efficiency, quicker external data ingestion, and reduced downtime.

“Our mission is to save and improve lives around the world through life-saving medicines and vaccines, so we need to think of patients at the end who are counting on us. Again, you have to really enable our sites to be truly patient-centric,” Sheller said. “We really want to make the most out of the work of our clinical researchers lifting the weight of the past to make room for the future—simplifying complexity, taking all those manual steps out of the system, and ultimately bringing medicines and vaccines to patients faster.”

Reference

Reilly J, Sheller J. Merck: Driving Transformations With a Connected Clinical Platform. September 3, 2025. 2025 Veeva R&D and Quality Summit.