About the Author 

Dr. Otis Johnson started out in the pharmaceutical industry doing basic research in an immunology lab at New York University School of Medicine. He then transitioned to clinical research at Merck & Co., Inc., where he spent a total of 13 years in various roles. He spent the first 6 years at Merck in a clinical scientist role co-authoring clinical trial protocols (research design, volunteer selection criteria, and clinical trial instructions) and clinical study reports. He also led a team of clinical scientists and ran various operational aspects of the clinical trials. Otis has a key eye for identifying ways to improve efficiency and always did value-added work outside of his core job description. One notable value-added project Otis did as a clinical scientist was writing and producing a professional-grade training video to reduce travel costs associated with worldwide travel to train trial nurses, physicians and study coordinators how to perform quality lung function tests consistently.

Because of this quality, Otis was asked to participate in a major restructuring initiative at Merck to improve the efficiency of its scientific and operational divisions. This project led to the creation of a dedicated patient recruitment and feasibility department, intended to create discipline and focus on processes to facilitate better planning and execution of clinical trials. The initial focus of the department was on better country and site selection and improved predictability through patient recruitment planning. Otis later joined this dedicated group and founded a clinical informatics function that provided all the analytics that supported feasibility and patient recruitment for clinical trials. Otis and his team began tracking metrics rigorously and were able to show that when his team was involved in planning and running clinical trials, the trials his team was involved in were more likely to finish on time. These performance metrics were largely responsible for the full team making it through the Merck-Schering Plough merger fully intact, while there were large employee reductions in other parts of the company.  A contract research organization (CRO) reached out to Otis in 2013 to explain the issues they were having in their feasibility group and mentioned that the group was not data driven and was not really much of a feasibility group. The hiring manager was aware of Otis’ capabilities from his industry presentations and publications. Otis joined the CRO in May of 2013 to lead the group. He rapidly transformed the existing feasibility group into a state-of-the-art feasibility & clinical informatics function, a result he won an operational excellence award for. He did this by making better use of the existing data assets the company had access to, introducing new data sources and hiring dedicated clinical informatics data analysts to crunch data and make better sense of it.

Otis has a bachelor of science degree in Health Science with a concentration in Medical Laboratory Sciences, a master of public administration (MPA) in Health Policy & Management from New York University and a Ph.D. in Management with a specialization in Leadership & Organizational Change from Walden University.