Evidation’s Newsletter: Direct Connection – Measure What Matters

Measure What Matters

The rise of smart wearable devices in recent years, combined with significant user adoption and engagement, creates new opportunities to rethink how health should be measured. Only by measuring what is important to each individual can healthcare move toward a more patient-centric model that improves the patient experience and health outcomes. A framework recently published describes how incorporating consistent patient engagement, and seeking patient input early and often, can help to ensure a focus on digital measures of what truly matters to the patients, rather than developing digital versions of (often poor) traditional assessments.  A critical step in evaluating the utility of any digital measure is determining whether it can measure a clinically-meaningful change.  

Will the time and effort required of biopharmaceutical companies to understand what matters to patients so that they can develop digital measures and incorporate them into clinical trials pay off?  A survey conducted by BCG with over 3,200 patients, patient advisory groups and HCPs across 5 countries suggest that it will. Respondents wanted “trials that reflect real world outcomes that matter to patients” above all attributes other than “affordable access,” but only 57% of the respondents feel that pharma companies are doing a good job at this. In addition, HCP respondents stated that they would be more willing to engage with companies which they consider to be patient-centric, and more than 50% of the doctors would be willing to prescribe their medications, all else being equal.

Other Good Reads:

FDA Launches the Digital Center of Excellence | FDA

Digitizing Clinical Trials | npj Digital Medicine

A Roadmap for Developing Study Endpoints in Real-World Settings | Duke Margolis Center for Health Policy

Understanding Participant Needs for Engagement and Attitudes towards Passive Sensing in Remote Digital Health Studies | 14th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare

How Data From Wearables Will Revolutionize Healthcare | Forbes

Three Lessons from Covid-19 on Accelerating Biopharma Innovation | STAT

Reporting of demographic data and representativeness in machine learning models using electronic health records | Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association

What we’ve been up to:

Research: Our research with Sanofi presented at EASD’s annual meeting shows that messaging personalized for those with chronic conditions like diabetes makes them more likely to get vaccinated. Increasing flu vaccination is critical because it will protect both vulnerable individuals and communities while reducing the strain on our health care system, and we can improve our reach by delivering these messages at scale, digitally. Personalized health care messaging is only one aspect of virtual care, which is quickly becoming a vital complement to in-person health care. View the poster presentation here. 

Patient group engagement is increasingly used to inform the design, conduct and dissemination of clinical trials and other medical research activities. However, priorities of industry sponsors and patient groups differ, and there is no framework to help these groups identify beneficial engagement activities. Evidation’s Bray Patrick-Lake co-authored a paper that refines activities across the medical product development lifecycle and showcases a prioritized tool to help clinical research sponsors and patient groups identify high-priority engagement activities. Read the full article here.

Point of View: Becoming patient-centric begins with real-world evidence: technology drives innovation, but research and trials must be accessible, privacy-safe and return value to participants. Learn how real-world evidence generation is evolving to meet patient needs. Download the white-paper here.  

Women should be able to speak – unapologetically. Hear from one of our engineers, Ariane Coffin, and other local women in tech on gender discrimination and the importance of self-expression here.

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