How IQVIA and Veeva Are Accelerating Global Clinical Trials for Faster Patient Access

In a recent interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Paul Shawah, EVP of Strategy at Veeva Systems, and Richard Staub, President of R&D Solutions at IQVIA, discussed their companies’ new global clinical and commercial partnership. Designed to simplify and accelerate clinical trials, the collaboration aims to maximize value for customers by integrating software, data, and services from both organizations. Early feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, underscoring the partnership’s potential to streamline workflows, enhance data quality, and support both traditional and decentralized clinical trial models, ultimately helping sponsors bring therapies to market faster.

ACT: How might this collaboration influence timelines for bringing new treatments to market?

Shawah: This collaboration is all about speed and simplicity. It’s about giving sponsors access to everything they need to run clinical trials efficiently using IQVIA’s technology. Our goal is to simplify and standardize trials, making them more efficient and providing a better experience for sponsors, research sites, and ultimately patients. When we achieve that, we can significantly reduce the effort and duration of trials.

But it’s not just about technology—it’s also about processes. Achieving faster timelines requires partners like IQVIA. By combining their years of trial expertise with advanced technology, we can save time across the clinical development process, ultimately getting medicines into patients’ hands more quickly.

Staub: With the Veeva EDC platform specifically, we’ve seen that contracting and system build times are much faster due to the system’s ease of use. Studies can start sooner, and sites are more compliant with data entry, which allows us to stay on top of data cleaning throughout the trial. By the time the study ends, it’s primarily about finalizing data cleaning and locking the last patients, so sponsors can move efficiently to the next phase of development or submit to regulatory authorities.

Full Interview Summary: IQVIA and Veeva have launched a new global clinical and commercial partnership aimed at simplifying and accelerating clinical trials while maximizing value for customers. The primary goal of the collaboration is customer success—enabling clients to seamlessly access and use software, data, and services from both companies in an efficient, integrated manner. Early feedback on the partnership has been overwhelmingly positive, highlighting its potential to deliver both near-term and long-term benefits.

On the commercial side, the agreement allows customers to combine technologies from IQVIA and Veeva easily. IQVIA has joined Veeva’s technology and services partner programs as an AI partner, opening opportunities for its data to enhance Veeva products, including AI-driven applications. Clinically, IQVIA can leverage Veeva’s full suite of applications, such as Veeva EDC, to streamline study builds and trial execution. By combining the strengths of both organizations, the partnership aims to simplify workflows, improve compliance, and speed up data collection and cleaning, enabling sponsors to bring therapies to market faster.

The collaboration enhances clinical data management by integrating IQVIA’s CRO expertise with Veeva’s technology platforms. This “plug-and-play” approach allows trial sponsors to use the best-fit technologies for each study, improving efficiency and data quality. Sites benefit from user-friendly systems that encourage timely data entry, while sponsors gain faster access to clean, locked data for regulatory submission or progression to the next development phase.

Looking ahead, the partnership is positioned to support decentralized and hybrid trials, where technology interfaces directly with patients in addition to traditional sites. By combining operational expertise with advanced technology, IQVIA and Veeva aim to enable flexible, patient-centric studies that reduce timelines, improve research efficiency, and create new opportunities for innovation in clinical trial design.