‘We Redefine the Way Clinical Trials are Conducted’: An Interview with Forte CEO Shree Kalluri

“Our mission is to help customers streamline the clinical trial operations process to save time and resources, allowing our customers to focus on the science and take care of the patients.”

Forte provides clinical trial management, clinical data management and research administration solutions for cancer centers, academic medical centers, and health systems to unleash their research potential.

The company was incorporated in 2000 and is headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin.

Shree Kalluri, Forte Founder/CEO/President, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Ensuring Value-Based Clinical Trials

In the eClinical trial landscape, disparate systems, point solutions, or fragmented adoption across departments renders the organizations operating in this arena vulnerable to compliance risks. CIOs of such organizations are always on a quest to find standards-based, proven systems to streamline operations for their research team. To mitigate such challenges in clinical trial operations, Forte came into being eighteen years ago with a vision to fundamentally redefine the way clinical trials are conducted. This software and technology-enabled services company provides comprehensive solutions for cancer centers, AMCs, and health systems’ in the clinical research marketplace. The primary focus of Forte encircles the areas of clinical trial management, clinical data management, and research administration.

As healthcare organizations continue to emphasize remote monitoring, eSource, and electronic data exchange to enhance industry-wide efficiency and reduce monitoring costs, Forte’s standards-based approach to clinical trials provides a robust infrastructure for its customers, allowing them to share data electronically with sponsors instead of manually entering the data multiple times.

“Our customers are working hard to discover life-changing drugs and therapies, but the business operations of running clinical trials are very cumbersome. Our mission is to help customers streamline the clinical trial operations process to save time and resources, allowing our customers to focus on the science and take care of the patients,” says Shree Kalluri, Founder, CEO, President and Chief Customer Officer, Forte.

In doing so, the company’s enterprise clinical trial management software, OnCore, offers a comprehensive set of solutions that assists research organizations in their day-to-day clinical trial operations. OnCore equips organizations with full visibility of their research portfolio with functionality to assist operations management, billing compliance, committee management, comprehensive analytics, and more. The company’s analytics platform, Forte Insights, helps clinical operations leaders surface the right clinical data to help them identify protocols and processes in need of improvement, empowering them to make the right decisions for the institution to improve the quality of research operations.

Forte is governed by the mission to provide a great experience for its customers, as evidenced by its Onsemble Community which includes a bi-annual conference where the nation’s leading clinical research professionals share best practices, address current challenges and support one another.The senior management of the company strongly believes in collaborating with its customers on challenges and needs, and many conferences result in new products and innovations that serve the entire community. Such a conglomeration instills trust among Forte’s clients and paves way for decades-long relationships.

Evidently, as Forte goes the extra mile to solve challenges for its customers, the company has created a strong customer base. This is further corroborated by the myriad anecdotes, depicting the success that the company’s clients achieved by implementing its solutions. Back in 2006, Markey Cancer Center prepared to earn their NCI designation and, when the institute assessed its own systems, it realized that without a centralized operational workflow or solution, managing, searching, categorizing, and sorting the immense research data was an uphill task. To mitigate the challenges, Markey Cancer Center implemented Forte’s OnCore Enterprise Research System that allowed the center to manage its clinical trial data through a centralized enterprise system. As a result, the cancer research center managed to earn the NCI designation, becoming the 68th institute in the country to achieve the accolade.

In the impending years, the focus for Forte revolves around providing technology-enabled services for the clinical trial ecosystem, in addition to the company’s portfolio of software solutions, that eliminate internal roadblocks and lessen the resource burden that many clinical trial research organizations confront due to lack of budget. “We’ll continue to collaborate with our customers to identify the painpoints and assist them to advance and unleash their research potential,” Kalluri concludes.

“Our clinical trial management software, OnCore, offers a comprehensive set of solutions that assists healthcare research organizations in their day-to-day clinical trial operations. OnCore equips organizations with full visibility of their research portfolio with operations management, billing compliance, committee management, comprehensive analytics, and more.”