eClinical Solutions study models 241% ROI from AI-powered clinical trial data platform

Brian Buntz 

Imagine you were in charge or managing a project worth potentially billions of dollars that had upwards of six million data points. You could have any system you devise in the world to integrate this data. And yet, the first tool you reach for is a standard Excel spreadsheet.

That thought experiment isn’t far away from the reality of how much data many phase 3 clinical trial protocols collect. That is an average of about 5.9 million data points per phase 3 protocol, according to a 2025 Tufts CSDD/TransCelerate study. The same study found that as much as 30% of participant and site burden is tied to non-core or non-essential procedures, suggesting the problem is avoidable operational load.

It’s no wonder then that one of the nearer-term places AI-enabled platforms are claiming measurable traction is clinical trial data operations. A recent report from the clinical trial platform company eClinical Solutions, modeled by Hobson & Company from customer interviews, projected a 25% reduction in the time from last patient, last visit (LPLV) to database lock, the final sprint where delays are most expensive, alongside a 90% reduction in time spent on data aggregation and a 45% reduction in data manager review time.

The study confirmed results eClinical sees regularly in working with customers, according to Venu Mallarapu, Chief Transformation and AI Officer at the company. “These are existing customers of ours who are using the platform and have articulated what impact it has had, comparing their pre-elluminate and post-elluminate situations across three areas: modernizing infrastructure and analytics, clinical and data operations, and the overall speed and quality of trials,” he said.

When Hobson & Company, the research firm behind the eClinical-sponsored study, modeled those percentage gains across a single hypothetical sponsor running 40 active studies per year, the result was a projected 241% three-year return on a $5 million platform investment, with $17.2 million in total modeled value. “The 241% is based on a sponsor model within the Hobson research,” Mallarapu said. “The denominator is the total three-year investment in elluminate, and the return encompasses the value created across reducing data aggregation, streamlining operations, and improving cycle times.” The paper itself notes that actual results may vary.

One anonymized senior director of data management at a Top 30 pharma told Hobson that reviews became more efficient because teams were no longer “re-reviewing the same data” and could raise issues directly in a given record.

When asked why some sponsors still cling to manual workflows, Mallarapu implied it is sometimes something of a reflex that persists even after adopting a platform designed to eliminate the need to shuffle data to and fro. “In some cases, knowing fully well that using a platform like elluminate, you could directly review data online within the application, they still have processes where they download data into spreadsheets, put those spreadsheets in SharePoint, have people work collaboratively in that environment, and then bring the data back in,” he said. “In those cases, obviously, you would not see the same kind of outcomes we’re quoting with some of these customers.”