Medidata's Social Innovation Lab: Making A Difference In Life Sciences – Medidata, A Dassault Systèmes Company & Nonprofit Partners

Medidata, a technology company that develops and markets software as a service for clinical trials created the Social Innovation Lab with their nonprofit partners; Mission: Cure, CRDN, Lazarex Cancer Foundation, & NMQF, to provide employees with a skills-based volunteer opportunity while also helping them gain industry acumen. The Social Innovation Lab works with medical and scientific nonprofits to help them address problems that they might not have budget or expertise to solve.
Surveys show employees give the program extremely high marks for its contribution to their professional development and to nonprofits it serves. In 2021 it worked on such projects as:
creating a networking structure and platform to connect rare-disease patients and advocates in the UK with the pharmaceutical & academic players who can provide care and treatment
- creating an interactive heat-map and platform for the National Minority Quality Forum so sponsors and field practitioners could run their clinical trials across racial and ethnic groups and share knowledge, tools, and best practices so that the wider medical community could adopt these learnings
- creating a template campaign for a rare-disease patient registry focused on chronic pancreatitis for The Mission:Cure team
- creating a survey tool to help cancer patients determine their needs to succeed in a clinical trial and to access the resources that are available to them
Thirty-one employees donated a total of 2,604 working hours to the four projects or $177,072 of employee value. The lab not only amplifies employee talents and skills, but potentially yields insights and capabilities of value to Medidata.