Pension Pot Chaos

Life Sciences is a complex industry!  The complexity is usually necessary and is all part of working in a highly regulated industry with lots at stake across many levels – the higher the stakes, the greater the level of complexity.

Whilst complexity itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, what it often does, is add a layer of fog to proceedings which in turn makes it hard to visualise or understand concepts or technologies.

It is against this backdrop that I often find myself, looking at what we do at eClinical Solutions, the problem we solve and trying to find analogies with everyday life.

One such analogy that I’ve been thinking about today is ‘pension pot chaos’, bear with me for a moment and I’ll explain.  

Now, I have worked for multiple companies, each of which has had its own pension scheme that is handled by different pension providers – all with separate accounts, login details etc. When I move to a new company, I open a new pension scheme through that employer whilst still having the previous scheme(s) open.

This has resulted in a situation where I have silos of pension monies, with various providers and no clear view on how much I have in total, what my forecast retirement funds might be, or in some instances, how to even access the accounts/who the account is with.

Now, part of this is down to personal laziness and not prioritising keeping my finances in order. However, this is also due to how difficult it is to centralize all of your pension pot(s) and easily gain access to that data, with an aggregated view across the whole. The challenging part is doing the ‘centralization’ piece, as this involves mapping each individual pot to a single source of truth. This is no easy task, when you have multiple sources of pension pot, and each has its own account/login credentials and unique set of ‘rules’ about transferring from one to another.

It makes me think about the parallels with clinical trials and challenges with centralizing and surfacing clinical trial data with each trial (pension pot) often silo(d) from other trial data, with no clear ability to be able to easily organize and surface data across multiple trials. Often the data may also reside with multiple different CRO’s (pension providers).  Even at the individual trial level, you could consider each data source (EDC, eCOA, Labs) etc as a single pension pot, with significant programming work required to wrangle and surface the data in the way that is needed, for stakeholders to make accurate/timely decisions on the data.

Happily there are now a number of apps out there to help with my ‘pension pot’ chaos predicament, and there are platforms like the elluminate data hub platform that help with the ‘data chaos’ challenge we see in our industry.

Clearly, I am over-simplifying the problem, but hopefully you appreciate the parallels. Additionally, all donations to my retirement fund will be happily received, feel free to donate to whichever one of my pension pots you can find!