I’m on the road to Munich, where I’ll be orchestrating a panel on the future of clinical trials. While reviewing the guests’ presentations to prepare my questions, something hit me: is Single Sign-On really what this industry needs?
One KOL’s presentation is a long rant against the digital burden of all the platforms his staff and he must use to get data entered on time. Let’s face it, we’ve heard this complaint so often that we’ve become numb to it.
Yet at the end of the presentation, he proposes SSO.
At Yendou, there’s something I always tell the team: don’t tell me what the customer wants. Tell me what they suffer from. And very often, it turns out that the problem they first mention is never the real problem. You have to keep digging until you find the root cause. Some customers are great at coming up with ideas too, but they’re definitely best at recognizing the problem.
Looking at his suggested solution, I thought, wait.
I’d be very curious to know how many social media accounts and how many video streaming subscriptions every site employee has. Because if they have more than one per category (I suspect they have a minimum of two to four), then Single Sign-On is not the answer to our multi-platform problem.
Since I joined this industry in 2020, I’ve kept hearing people speak in the language of solutions: decentralized trials, patient centricity, care at home, virtual visits, workflow automation, patient recruitment services, and now Single Sign-On.
Every single time, it turned out the solution wasn’t solving the real problem, but rather the periphery of it.
There isn’t much first-principles thinking happening in ClinTech development, and too often we let the complaint dictate what we build. Why?
None of us walk around asking X, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook to get together and offer us a Single Sign-On.
Why?
Why is it that being active on different platforms, with different logins we use every day, no, I must correct that, platforms we use multiple times a day, doesn’t make us scream “Single Sign-On,” yet we think it’s the answer we need in clinical research?
What’s the real problem here?
I don’t have the answer yet. But whatever it is, SSO is a falsche Fährte - a false trail.
Originally published in Trials & Triumphs, Yendou’s newsletter on the work between RFI and First Patient In.
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