Dear SCDM Friends,
2025 is in full swing and our SCDM community and leadership have been taking broad strides into our future. As our last three-year vision comes to fruition and Clinical Data Science cements itself as an industry norm, the SCDM executive board met to frame priorities for our next five-year journey. We also have many updates from our certification, online education, conference, publication, and academia committees.
Let’s start with the SCDM 2025 State of the Industry address, where Carol Schaffer, formally stepped into her role as Chair of SCDM. At her February webinar, she shared not only successes of 2024 but also early insights of what’s to come, including industry challenges and SCDM’s vision for 2023 including clinical research 2.0., End to End Data Flow, Patient Choice, and Intelligent Technologies. Each of these provide opportunities and considerations for SCDM to grow, and support our members through certifications, technology, and role evolutions. Tanya du Plessis led a panel with Ward Lemaire (Vice chair, SCDM), Carol and me to discuss these aspects in greater detail. Foundationally, SCDM continues to prioritize education for our members and the launch of our Learning Experience Platform (LXP) is well on its way, with pilots of the platform in full swing. I have had a chance to “look under the hood” and must admit my excitement in bringing this technology to our vendors. Not only is the content curated and organized to align with the individual’s experience level, but it is also intuitive with the ability to ask questions, navigate a tailored learning experience to your own interests and yes, have practice questions entwined for those keen to prepare for their next certification.
Board of Trustees meeting updates
In February, the board met to go through aspects of the year ahead and our five year broader vision and introduce our new board members, Ram Mudaliar and Manny Vazquez. We will meet again in Brussels to confirm board member alignments with committees and projects as we plan for our key deliveries to our members in 2025. Look to have a more robust update from me in the next quarter on this topic.
Global Events
This year we have eight events in our global calendar for conferences.
New location for a Single Day Event and returning to South Africa
Of particular highlight is the inaugural Latin America single day event coming this November in Bogota, Colombia and the return of our South Africa single day event in August. More details on these will come in the summer, but preparations are well underway.
SCDM 2025 EMEA Conference
We also have the EMEA conference on 9-11 April fast approaching. While in Brussels, the SCDM board will have a special visit to KU Leuven University to introduce Clinical Data Science to our aspiring future generation before we join the workshops, leadership forums, industry summit and our conference sessions. Registration is now open, and I hope to see you there!
SCDM coming to China and India in June
June is also bustling with both China’s June 5-7 conference and India’s Single Day event on the 7th. Further details for both events and others throughout the calendar year will be coming soon.
Special collaboration with PHUSE
As a special collaboration to unite top industry leaders in the shaping of the future of clinical data, SCDM representatives joined PHUSE for a US Future Focus Connection in Orlando Florida on the 17th of March.
Education & Certification
Speaking of certifications, the Global Academic Council will be launching a CDM 101 webinar in the coming months to bring the middle chapter of the CDA, CDM, CDS journey to our members. This will be dovetailed with a robust study guide to help facilitate the learning journey.
Our Content Alignment Committee has been hard at work with generation of supporting GCDMP chapters for the CCDS certification with a target of piloting in Q3/Q4 of this year.
We also released our first JSCDM issue of 2025, with a letter from our former SCDM Chair, Patrick Nadolny, providing a wonderful overview of SCDM accomplishments of 2024. In addition, there are four articles covering clinical data standards in Academia, automating data entry for EHR, Evaluation and use of NLP reasoning and classification models as well as analysis of core competencies for our CDM profession in Japan. Each of these are excellent reads from our global thought leadership community. If you have been thinking about writing a journal article, connect with the Content Alignment Committee on what is needed for a submission.
There have also been numerous webinars coming through to our members with a highlighted six-part series on RBQM rolling now through the end of April. Just type in “RBQM” in the learning hub and check it out!
Volunteer
As always, volunteers are the heart of our society and there are opportunities at all levels of experience. If you are interested in taking part, check current opportunities! While there are many ways you can volunteer like being a speaker, an author, a content curator or simply a mentor, I am certain there will be many among you interested in our SCDM pilot of the CDS Certification coming later this year. To those of you already volunteering, thank you for your collaborative spirit. Together through the lens of clinical data management, we continue to step our industry into a future bright with the promise of new treatments and cures for a healthier world.
Cheers, Stephen
Stephen Cameron
Secretary, SCDM Board of Trustees
