Pfizer, China and 250 000 patients – the major Viedoc milestones during the first 15 years

2003 It’s all about the looks

The idea behind Viedoc was born in Uppsala, Sweden, by two former CRO-colleagues after winning a competition held by Sweden’s largest real estate company. The prize was a rental free office for 6 months which gave the business a kick-start.

The business idea was to bring freshness to the outdated world of clinical data capture with a software that was not only nice to look at but also easy to manage and use. The first version of the software was released in 2004 which enabled the team to start offering EDC-services to local marketing and biotech companies as well as academia.  

2008 First big killer contract 

Pfizer, the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company, put their trust in Viedoc – it all happened as a result of a coincidental meeting at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. One of the founders was waiting for his flight back home to Sweden and started a conversation with the woman next to him who coincidentally was in the same line of business and was about to purchase an EDC-system. After several demos for skeptical Pfizer-employees in Stockholm the team travelled to New York and it became clear that Viedoc outperformed two big US EDC vendors. Thanks to the flexibility and ability to add required new features to the Viedoc platform – the deal was sealed and Viedoc got the respect and trust of being a supplier to a major pharma company.  

2009 Oh – big in Japan

As the team expanded, a previous CRO colleague was hired responsible for investigating Japan as a new market. Although he was skeptical at first, the Japanese business soon took off. The new concept was to provide training sessions allowing the customers to be able to configure their own studies in Viedoc. Up until this moment, all of the study configurations had been done inhouse. Because of the successful training, customers in Japan started setting up and using Viedoc on their own.  As a result, the Viedoc network grew rapidly making Japan the single most important market for Viedoc in just a couple of years.  

2011 50 countries – a milestone

Offering a Software-as-a-Service solution you have to take into count that countries and regions are at different levels of maturity when it comes to using online services. Because of word of mouth Viedoc managed to get footprints in various countries and markets with very different digital skillsets. Viedoc is currently available in 14 languages including all the big ones in the world, from English to Mandarin, French and Japanese.  

2012 VieBee, the bee is born

Our mascot, Viebee, has all the qualities that we love: flexible, hard working and spreading prosperity and harmony. It all began when we started to think about redoing the whole platform from scratch, which later resulted in the second generation of Viedoc. Viebee was born in the same emerging thoughts and ideas that created the new version of Viedoc. As we like to work with imagery and try to capture the essence of our system in images rather than traditional it-architecture, the Viebee became our visual spokesperson helping us share our slogan “Enjoy Your Trial”.  

2013 A brand new platform was needed 

Viedoc, at that time, was just not good enough. We needed to dive into deep water, start from scratch and build a whole new platform not re-using a single row of code. Such ventures cost money.  We started a whole new development team and soon focused on releasing a basic product that we could get into clinical trials as soon as possible practicing an agile progamming – and business – development model working with real customer feedback. We pushed product releases every fourth week, a crazy speed for a relatively small company like Viedoc. We have pushed 42 new product releases of Viedoc since then.  

2014 Did anyone mention audit?

We love audits. The reason is pretty simple: being audited means that you have business. In 2014, when we passed a magical number of 200 audits, we started to realize the amount of work an audit actually requires. With the updates of GCP in 2017 it is now a requirement for sponsors to do audits before taking on a new EDC vendor. We facilitate this requirement by providing an independent quality report that customers can buy, saving both time and money.  

2015 250 000 patients – another milestone

Business kept growing and all of a sudden a quarter of million people had gone through our system. We try to think that this is merely the beginning – trust, regulations and legislations are somewhat slowing down the speed that our restless souls would like to travel at but from zero to a quarter of a millon people in about ten years time is pretty ok anyway.  

2015 China – so much down our alley

The Chinese market is really our style of doing business. We soon learned that Chinese sponsors have a great appetite for large scale studies while at the same time being concerned about efficiency and costs.  Starting business in China takes time, it requires establishing a local Chinese company and personal relations are key for long term commitments and business success. The Chineses business mentality suits us and we are convinced that China will be a big part of our business in the near future.  

2018 GDPR – no problem!

Why wait for the storm to come? With GDPR coming into force on May 25th 2018 we had already done most of the homework. Both China and Japan have similar requirements. Apart from adding encryption for data in storage and enabling users to approve access, delete accounts, study memberships and data from completed studies we have also added an option for two factor-authentication when logging into Viedoc. Everything is done to keep our client’s data as secure as possible. While at it, we also created a new client agreement regulating data processing and data privacy making sure everyone knows who is responsible for the data.