We’re excited to be back for another episode of the Life Sciences Today Podcast by Healthcare IT Today. My guest today is Alison Holland, Chief Customer Officer at Medable! In this episode, I talk with Holland about how her journey from London nurse to Covance veteran to digital trial leader shapes Medable’s strategy.
Holland started at the bedside and then spent nearly 20 years at a major CRO – Covance. She learned where trials really break: overloaded sites, fragmented systems, and patients battling logistics instead of disease. Medable’s answer is a reusable SaaS platform plus tightly scoped AI agents—first for CRAs, then for TMF, and next for sites—that automate the manual, low‑value work while keeping humans firmly in the loop.
She walks through concrete wins: PRO compliance jumping from ~75% to 95%, 20% more primary endpoint data, and up to 100 hours saved in study startup by configuring from therapeutic‑area libraries instead of rebuilding from scratch.
Holland’s chosen industry anti‑pattern is “change fatigue”: an exhausted ecosystem that no longer believes transformation will stick. Her counter is precision use cases that deliver undeniable value, build momentum, and make it possible to say, credibly, “Yes, we can” this time.
Check out the main topics of discussion for this episode of the Life Sciences Today podcast:
- Tell me about your journey.
- Who are your customers and how do you create value for them?
- What’s Medable’s sweet spot for the size of the customer, the kind of customer, or the phase of the study?
- We saw this recurring pattern where the decisions would be taken in the last month before the trial, and a subpattern where, in the first two weeks, there would very often be a protocol revision. Is that your experience as well?
- Do you have to do a custom build for every customer and every trial?
- How do you capture the value?
- Are we going to see AI Agents replacing CROs in our lifetime?
- What are three things you want to do for your customers in 2026?
- What is the biggest anti-pattern in the clinical R&D industry today?
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Thanks so much for listening!
23 min