With so many CRO’s out there, which one is the best?
Last year we wrote an article on why we felt that CRO’s in general would be doing well in 2009. Not to pat ourselves on the back, but overall the CRO market has done well since then. So we decided to take it one step further and look around and try to determine which is the best CRO in the industry. Obviously, this is somewhat subjective, and others will probably disagree with us, but we have decided on which CRO we feel has the best overall reputation.
We spoke with about a dozen upper level managers in the pharmaceutical industry and asked them about their experiences with companies from the industry. One company’s name kept coming up. Admittedly, a dozen opinions isn’t a statistically large population to speak with, but it was at least adequate for our purposes.
It isn’t often that a pioneer in an industry or one of the larger players in an industry is considered the best. Usually we have found that the smaller, more nimble companies do better. How many people would pick General Motors as the best car maker?
However, in this case, the company whose name kept coming up was Quintiles. I would suspect that most people know the name. They are a very large player in their market, with offices world-wide and in close to a dozen states in the US. Before going any further, we need to emphasize that Quintiles is not a customer of ours in any way, and they are not paying us to write this article.
The company works in a wide area of therapeutic areas–Cardiovascular, Central Nervous System, Diabetes/Endocrinology, Infectious Diseases, Internal medicine, Oncology, Pediatrics and Women’s Health. That doesn’t leave too many areas not covered by them. Perhaps hangnails, liver spots and excessive nose hair.
All phases of Clinical Trials are included in their expertise. Central labs, Clinical Monitoring, Patient and Investigator Recruitment, Regulatory expertise, Safety and Risk Management are just a few areas they were complimented on.
We are experts on going through company websites and finding information on companies. We understand that they are usually tooting their own horns, but on the Quintiles site there is an unusual amount of good news, which we feels corroborates the good things said about them by others to us.
The first thing we noticed was they appointed a new Practice Leader by the name of James Kirk on April 28 of this year. It must have been quite a coup to get him to leave the Starship Enterprise to go to work for Quintiles. And can Doctor McCoy be far behind? Beam me up Scotty…..
On a more serious note, a few days earlier they were named Best Clinical Service Provider according to two recently released surveys. Results from the fourth annual “CRO Industry Update,” an independent survey of executives at pharmaceutical and biotech companies conducted by William Blair & Company in conjunction with CenterWatch, cited Quintiles as the most frequently mentioned favorite CRO. For “Preferred CRO Ranking by Quality,” Quintiles was rated number one, with three times as many votes as the second place competitor.
In a separate industry survey, respondents rated Quintiles number one in 17 of 18 major attributes, often by wide margins. The independently conducted “The 2009 CRO Quality Benchmarking Report” by Industry Standard Research (ISR) asked 160 pharmaceutical and biotechnology executives – all with recent experience working with outsourced development providers – to rate their perceptions of 13 CROs and three non-traditional functional service providers.
On April 15 of this year, the company was recognized as one of the top 25 companies to work for in Canada.
They were also recently named to Training Magazines Top 125 for Workforce Training and Development Excellence.
On their website there are several more countries and organizations that Quintiles says have named them as the best place to work. We would be interested in hearing from people at Quintiles about their experiences. Is it really that good a place to work? Are all these awards real or bogus? Judging by the reaction of the dozen or so executives we spoke to, it’s real, but is it too good to be true? Let us know.
And if your company has recently had dealings with them, feel free to let us know how it worked out for you.
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We are the champions….of the world….
Freddie Mercury
News Release
From the offices of Crane, Poole & Schmidt, Boston Legal Department.
We regret to announce that two of our lawyers, Denny Crane and Alan Shore have left Crane, Poole & Schmidt to work in the legal department at Quintiles.
We wish them well in their new endeavors.
Sincerely,
Shirley Schmidt
Senior Partner
Looks like some folks with sense of humor posting.more seriously, Quintiles is good place to work.Paid good, but dont come here if you don’t want to work a full day.Its nonstop go go go.But put your head down, work hard and look up, and its time to go home.
So I am the “Captain Jim Kirk” you referred to – after all these years of Star Trek being on the air, those jokes don’t “phase” me anymore!
By way of background, I joined Quintiles one year ago when they acquired our company, Eidetics. Eidetics had been in the biopharma market research business for over 20 years, and we were acquired to become part of Quintiles Consulting. We now work on a nice mix of our traditional high-end strategic research assignments (market segmentation, treatment landscapes, etc.), and some very challenging cooperative research assignments with and within Quintiles (for example, improving clinical trial recruiting efficiency, helping plan contract commercialization structures).
The way we became part of Quintiles is probably a useful perspective on your question of what it’s like to work here. Quintiles told us that they screened 60 different research firms to become part of the Consulting team. Judging from the scrutiny they put us through, they make very careful decisions about who becomes a part of the organization! I say that not because we were such a great find (of course, we are!) but senior management was very clear that their two criteria for our joining were that a) we had something concrete to contribute to the company’s clear vision of better ways to develop and make available to patients safer, more useful drugs and b) we truly wanted to be a part of the Quintiles team.
I can honestly say that everyone I’ve met since joining Quintiles meets those same criteria. These people are smart, nice, and hardworking – usually in life we get to pick only two of those three traits in our co-workers. These are folks who do a good job because jobs should be done well, not just because they get paid for it. I’m very proud to be here, I’m excited about what we’re doing now and what we will do in the future, and I’m psyched to be working with a team who are “givin’ all we’ve got, Captain,” as Scotty used to say!
Glad to meet you Captain Kirk. Also glad you have a sense of humor.
At first I didn’t understand the Boston Legal comment someone made, until I remembered that William Shatner had played both Denny Crane and Captain Kirk on TV.
Obviously it appears several of the Quintiles people have good senses of humor and irony.
Good luck on your career there.
Best Regards,
Bill Beattie
How should I register our site in Quitiles’ database…the link in their website seems to be down…please help jc@jcgarcia.com
How should I register our site in Quintiles’ database…the link in their website seems to be down…please help jc@jcgarcia.com
Unfortunately I have no idea. Sorry.
I have been with Quintiles for just over 8 years now and I would not trade it for anything! Most people that know me struggle to understand this – but I honestly enjoy every moment of my job. The better you look after the company, the better it looks after you. The company values its employees and that is rare to find. Quintiles offers its employees opportunity to grow and develop and best of all, they reward you for it. This company does indeed have excellent reward and recognition programs in place. So yes, all the good things you hear… are true.
Quintiles’ CRAs are all top notch for sure! As a clinical research coordinator who wants to be a CRA, Quintiles is my first choice by far.
I am a Quintilian CRA since November, 2008. I think that indeed is one of the best places to work because of the support that the company gives to the employee, the training and the work environment which facilitate to work as team and to do your best effort in order to achieve the goals of the studies.
Besides is a company that always is implementing the newest technology to improve the customer service and the quality of the work. So it is a company with very engaged people but the work well done gives you a lot of satisfactions.