Ari Bousbib
Analyst · Dave Windley with Jefferies
Yes. I mean, look, there's a high degree of interest from clients, okay, around how to operational DCT, and it's not like it's going to overwhelm and all of sudden become 100% overnight. As I said, large pharma, in particular, is experimenting. A lot of trials are using one composite or the other. So it's going to take time. So this is not next year or the year after that we're going to have to face the issue that you're raising. Our experience, customers are striving with how to make various point solutions fit together. So we are actually very -- being very aggressive here. We want to move to DCT. We've said this since the merger got 5 years ago, we want to accelerate and not slow down technology introduction and changing the model. Now obviously, your question you asked is a question what I asked of us many years ago, which is as you seek to replace labor in a model that where pricing is largely based on labor inputs, then aren't you lowering the value of the trial and the -- and et cetera, what are implications on the margin. So we don't believe so. We have -- as you know, we've had a long run effort to switch pricing to value and deliverables and outputs. That's number one, and that has made substantial progress. Our clients are not really looking at saving a couple of pennies here or there. They're looking at getting what they need -- the answers that they want faster, more efficiently with less error and with higher quality. And they are willing to pay a premium for that. Now they're not going to pay more than what they were paying before, but they're not going to pay less than what they're paying before. And so now the margin implication is correct. Over time, the more we deploy technology, the less we need people, the more there's going to be margin accretion. But again, this is going to take time. There are also new delivery roles, which offset some of the reduced CRA visit activity. So I think it's too early to comment on the exact margin impact for this overall. We are monitoring -- we do not anticipate this to disrupt our margin performance. R&DS is a very long-cycle business. We have -- I mentioned 89 fully decentralized trial ongoing that we won. But we're working on -- if you look at, as I said, just under maybe 900 to also full-service trials. So it's a fraction of that. If you look at the total trials we're involved with, this over 2,500 clinical trials that we're involved in globally. So it does take some time to penetrate. It's a slow-moving business. But it's a good point. We are totally focused on it. We do not anticipate a margin -- I'm sorry, a value deterioration. We do anticipate a margin accretion over the long term.