Aahuti Rai (Strategic Advisor, Healthcare Innovation at Four Points Consulting) & Jessica Smith (Co-Founder and CXO at SomX) discussed all things HealthTech, including the current barriers to HealthTech commercialization, holistic approaches to healthcare disruption and social impact, and their predictions for the future.
Here is a sneak peek of our conversation:
Q: Just to get your thoughts on real-world evidence, real-world data, and how this comes into play with health tech? How are we going to be utilizing technologies to speed us forward in this place? And also to be able to get into it, as you were alluding to earlier, a better scenario of patient or health consumer and physician relationship.
A: That’s a great question. I really think that is a huge opportunity and I think what these decentralized trials have enabled us to do is also gain insight into how these kinds of technologies are going to really benefit patient care in the long run outside of the parameters of the trial. Because, whether you’re in a trial or you’re receiving care, when you see a doctor or physician or any kind of health care professional, you will see them for a scheduled appointment at an allotted moment in time; maybe every six months, maybe more frequently than that. The health care professional or the trial lead, for instance, will have very little to no engagement with the patient in that in-between times. So, they really have no view on what is going on with the patient as they go about their life and how they live their life. It actually is giving us such a rich body of data to really understand patients and genuinely provide personalized care. Because we understand who these patients are as people. I think that’s really key.
It’s more than just talking about patients. It’s understanding someone as a person and how a condition, a medicine, or an intervention affects their life. How you can adapt your particular treatment regimen or management plan to fit in with their life and therefore, enable better outcomes over and above the very regimented endpoints that we see traditionally used in RCTs (randomized control trials). You get to measure so much more impact because there are so much more data to draw from.
I think from the clinical trial perspective, that’s fantastic because you learn so much more about a cohort of patients of people. You can refine and iterate to such a greater extent. Also from the health system perspective, as I said, it enables genuine person-centered care and personalized care in a way that we’ve never seen before. It also enables a physician to have insight into what a person has been doing between the X and Y period and then have a really in-depth and connected discussion with that person about what they’ve been experiencing rather than asking them exactly what it is. They’ve seen that already so they can interrogate some of that a bit more and understand some of these data points and put some color on it to then have a real impact.
For more of our discussion, you can watch the whole Fireside Chat with Aahuti Rai and Jessica Smith, or listen to the podcast version, below.
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