There are a lot of companies doing this already - Qunitiles, Blue Chip, Acurian, etc. Anything that can streamline the process is potentially beneficial
I used to work for a BigPharma designing their in-house clinical trial tracking software. The problem is not so much the platform, but system integration. We had a nice system with d3.js charts plotting Pk trials after results. A scheduling system with nice Ajax calendar component to schedule daily animal dosing. A in-life component that linked up with RFID scanners to track patient vitals/conditions. A nice drag-and-drop web GUI for setting up samples for mass spec analysis. All under a phase-by-phase, wizard step-by-step platform, from study design all the way to compliance reporting. Designing the system from the ground up wasn't difficult, system integration wasn't. We even had gadgetized all of the components so that PIs/lab associates could customize their daily dashboard.
Research groups are across the globe and use different stat packages. No one is willing to give up years of work in Excel spreadsheets, Phoenix, STATA whatever. So have to build tons of import/export tools to accommodate all of the tools.
Different research groups wanted different things. We had stakeholders, e.g., PIs from different research groups come in during all of the design/review meetings. One team wanted their scheduling calendar on 'MS Project' linear style layout, another team wanted it to be on the Outlook style. We ended up building both.
Different research groups had different hardware spec's as well. Throughout the pipeline, we had a nice tool that set up samples to be analyzed for mass spec analysis. Integrating with various hardware formats and different layout's, well-templates with existing in-house assay library database/web-services took a long time.
tl,dr; BigPharma has tons of proprietary assay, compounds database/web-service, third-party statistical packages and mass spec hardware spec's that a external vendor needs to integrate with; good luck.
