Articles
EDC: Caught in a Trap
By Timothy Pratt, PhD
Originally published in Applied Clinical Trials, June 2007
In 1969 Elvis Presley released the single "Suspicious Minds." It opened with the stanza: "We're caught in a trap...I can't walk out... because I love you too much baby." You may well be suspicious as to how on earth this relates to EDC or pretty much anything else pertaining to clinical trials. Stay with me, because it is very relevant to technology, and probably the technology you use to get your job done.
Stuck Like Glue
It's all about technology vectors. First movers in any technology tend to get caught in a trap - the insidious position of heavy investment in a technology to the point where they love it so much they just can't walk out.
Thomas Levitt, in his classic marketing piece published in 1960 "Marketing Myopia," identified the problem of companies that come to dominate an industry through being first movers on a technology becoming so vested in that technology that they're incapable of change.1 This is partially because they're stuck on a technology vector that just won't accommodate it, and partially because they lose focus on the need they set out to meet and focus on their product instead.
The consumer of first-mover technologies is often stuck with outmoded obsolescent technology because the companies cannot offer anything else. Examples surround you every day - the U.S. railway system, the NTSC television standard, analogue cell phones, and perhaps the EDC system you're using. And, displacing newer technologies like the highway system, HD TV, digital cell and VOIP technologies are now being rapidly adopted. But what about EDC?
A little history to understand the present: After early attempts involving Remote Data Entry, EDC really started being heavily promoted 7 to 10 years or so ago when some of the biggest technology vendor companies were founded.2,3 They had great solutions for the time, and while many smaller concerns have come and gone, some of the first movers remain with us to this day - but they're caught in a technology trap at least 10 years old.
