“Pioneering Clinical Trials for New Medical Breakthroughs”

Alexandra Gerritsen, President & COO at Artemis Research, has an extensive background in technology and operations, which she brought to Artemis 18 months ago. She has a strength and a passion for leading transformations within companies. She embraces and optimizes a high-performance culture, aligns and elevates talent, and consistently delivers revenue and profitability results while maintaining high employee engagement. She has transformed the company by promoting, building, and coaching a middle management team across Artemis. This focus on empowering the team from the bottom-up has allowed each department to get more efficient and effective; for example, the Marketing and Sales team has increased their leads by 200% and reduced the cost per lead by 50%.

Alexandra has implemented technology best practices, such as CRIO for e-source and e-regulatory to allow the company site to move away from paper documentation to a sophisticated system that will allow coordinators more work-life balance and also ensure Artemis is delivering the highest quality data to their customers and sponsors. Additionally, one of her passions is customer experience, and she implemented a customer survey tool within her first 90 days. This tool now measures the patient experience and their sponsor experience to ensure they deliver this highest quality service.

"Artemis is constantly searching for innovative methods and striving to push the industry towards utilizing incredible new technological advancements and processes."

According to Alexandra, now more than ever, clinical trials are vital for discovering new treatments for diseases and new ways to detect, diagnose, and reduce the chance of developing the disease. Clinical trials can show researchers what does and doesn’t work in humans that cannot be learned in the laboratory or animals. “Without clinical trials, such as those we conduct at our sites, we would not have breakthrough mRNA research that has led to record breaking vaccine rollouts for the COVID-19 pandemic. Without research and our fantastic clinical trial participants, new medical breakthroughs and disease prevention would not be possible!” she says.

Artemis is constantly searching for innovative methods and striving to push the industry towards utilizing incredible new technological advancements and processes. “Since starting with Artemis, I have worked with the team to implement Salesforce for patient recruitment, launched e-source and e-regulatory systems, and much more,” explains Alexandra. “Artemis’ commitment to our core value of continuous improvement means we embrace advancements that not only ensure a better patient experience but helps our team be as efficient and detailed as possible in an industry powered by clean and precise data.”

Fundamentally, Artemis understands how important each clinical trial participant is to the research process. Not only is a participant entrusting them with their health and wellbeing, but their participation is helping drive new medical treatments and innovations. “We have fantastic clinical research staff that follow and closely monitor each patient to ensure that they have any and all questions answered and feel comfortable and taken care of throughout their participation and follow up,” adds Alexandra. “Our coordinators and Investigators are known for creating bonds and a trusting environment with our patients that not only keep them coming back for multiple studies but also referring them to friends and family members.” Patient referrals are one of their primary sources of gaining new patients. “It is our staff’s dedication to our participants at the individual level that leads us to have over a 95% retention rate with our volunteers. We gladly show our appreciation to each and every participant because medical breakthroughs could not happen without the generosity of our incredible participants.”

The company just opened a vaccine unit at their San Diego location and worked on COVID-19 vaccines and will be looking to expand to be an industry leader in vaccine trials. “This was a very important step for us to take to continue the growth of Artemis and expand on an indication we have been successful in,” elucidates Alexandra. “Secondly, with our acquisition by Headlands Research, Artemis will be able to increase the number of studies we can have our patients participate in each year. We are excited to be providing the San Diego and Riverside communities with access to more advances in medicine than ever before!” IE