How Digital Agreements Help Life Sciences Companies Deliver Life-Saving Products to Market Faster

By Seonah Iverson, Product Marketing Manager, Docusign

In life sciences, efficiency can make or break a company’s ability to get a revolutionary drug or device into the market. The entire development process—R&D, clinical trials and, ultimately, public release—is fraught with regulatory red tape and other known hurdles. But there’s a self-imposed hurdle that life sciences IT leaders can eliminate: time and resource drain resulting from clunky processes and paperwork.

The key to cutting costs and accelerating time-to-market is building a company-wide, modern System of Agreement. It’s not enough for individual departments to adopt features such as electronic signatures or digital forms. Those are steps in the right direction, but as life sciences leaders like Boston Scientific have discovered, digitizing processes across the organization is a far more effective strategy.

Does your organization suffer from outdated IT? Symptoms include:

• Compliance risks associated with paper contracts

• Inability to track medical device service level agreements and warranty info, or to prove that repair work meets industry compliance

• Failure to attract and retain top talent because the HR team lacks a consistent method to handle onboarding forms and paperwork

• Delays and inefficiencies when launching clinical trials, registering participants, collecting and organizing signed consent forms, or handling required communications after the trials end  

A modern System of Agreement that is automated and connected end-to-end eliminates all of these pain points, and the payoff can be profound. A recent Cognizant survey found that life sciences executives expected to reduce costs by 3 percent ($974 million per company, on average) by digitizing internal processes. That does not account for the savings or improved patient experiences that life sciences organizations realize by digitizing external processes, as well.

Docusign is a trusted partner to 14 of the top 15 pharmaceutical companies and 11 of the top 15 medical device companies. By going digital, our customers not only slash costs and meet regional and global compliance standards but can also move their products to market 21 days faster and reduce form errors by 88 percent, on average.

Read our free solution overview, 10 Digital Prescriptions for Life Sciences, to learn how your life sciences organization can reap the benefits of a company-wide commitment to digital agreements.