The High Cost of Data Management Churn

There are not enough highly qualified data managers to work on every project and every study. With over 4,000 open data management jobs in Biotech and Pharma alone on LinkedIn, there is an obvious need for data managers everywhere in today’s market. Many companies in the life sciences are struggling to hire data managers with the right combination of experience, therapeutic and industry knowledge. Once you have a team in place – how do you keep them with you to avoid the data management churn?

Data review in many companies is still a mostly manual process, and manual work takes a long time. Using SAS and excel for data review is difficult and time consuming. 75% of companies are still using SAS or EDC as the core of their data integration and review strategy. This puts strain on data managers, especially as clinical trials are increasingly complex. Over 70% of data is coming from outside of EDC, compounding the problem for internal teams.

All of this data and manual work is leading to a high volume of burnout for data managers. Losing a team member to burnout and having them leave your organization has a ripple effect throughout a team. It is only one step in the cycle of burnout. You lose a team member because they are burnt out, meaning the remaining team members have 15-30% more work to make up for the loss, which leads to their burnout, which leads to them leaving, and it goes on and on like this. While this is not a new phenomenon, data suggests that 67% of all workers believe burnout has worsened over the course of the pandemic.

There is also the financial fallout from this employee churn. Almost half your time is now spent transitioning work, recruiting, and training new hires.

During this time of recruiting and training, teams are forced to focus only on critical path work and to de-prioritize important initiatives like planning and standardization.

If you’re considering completely outsourcing your data management efforts in order to improve employee retention numbers, you may want to reconsider. Having your data spread across numerous vendors only further impacts data quality and timelines.

Luckily, there’s a better way forward. eClinical’s elluminate Data Central workbench enables data managers to automate and unify all data sources into a single source of truth. Allowing for projects to be more transferable within your teams for faster transitioning and ramp up for new Data Managers. elluminate helps to document data review activities that support the data review plan, and with automated data standardization, governance and lineage is always available.

elluminate is proven to automate and reduce manual data review activities by 35% giving the data management team and key stakeholders access to higher quality data faster for better collaboration and reduced burnout to help improve satisfaction and retention levels.

If you want to see what better, faster, and easier data can unlock… Contact us today for a demo.