Blog 7 - What we learned - 4 highlights from DPHARM: Disruptive Innovations 2020
Our seventh blog post outlines Shimmer’s experience attending The Conference Forum’s DPHARM: Disruptive Innovations US 2020 conference that centered on all the innovation that is underway to shake up how the clinical trials industry currently operates.
The past couple of years have already seen some positive, incremental change to the broad operations behind improving clinical trials. DPHARM 2020 was focused on bringing like-minded personnel together to share their work and experience of how to make this happen. The impact that technology is having was and continues to be a strong theme demonstrated by the rapid deployment and scaling of technologies in current trials and studies.
If this year’s DPHARM conference is anything to go by, we are on the cusp of seeing some transformational change in how clinical research is currently executed and galvanized through learnings from the pandemic and how to move forward with encouragement and focus on tangible goals to improve clinical research and clinical trials.
What we have learned:
Telehealth - the one to watch!
We are in the midst of a monumental shift to telemedicine use in this post Covid era: Given the national (and global) advice from most national governments is to stay at home where possible, there was a sense of urgency to increase access to telehealth and remote monitoring services so a level of routine could be maintained for those who needed access to care. In the US, since March 13th the access and growth of telehealth was made possible by an emergency declaration signed under the Stafford Act expanding telehealth benefits providing flexibility and awareness. This would now seem inconceivable to return to a pre-covid state whereby removing these privileges for some beneficiaries would happen, so the future is trending up and poised for a transformative change.
2. CTTI presents their vision for Clinical Trials in 2030!
Decentralized studies have exciting potential through a number of factors, and the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative (CTTI) built their vision around a couple of main focus areas for trials improvement. CTTI outlined their vision at DPharm 2020 highlighting the need for change and describing COVID as the ‘great revealer and the great accelerator’. What can push the industry from conversation into action? They outline a couple of top-level areas to think about; faster trial participant recruitment ultimately reducing the cost for sponsors. Improved participant retention, allowing mores data to be acquired and reducing the timelines of the overall trial. Trial participants should experience no impact on their daily lives because they are part of a study, therefore these studies enhance the convenience for participants. The have succinctly put this together in a vision for the way forward.
3. You can’t beat Raw Data!
The theme of integrity in the dataset ran across multiple presentations over the course of the 2 days. While most would agree that this is paramount and that trials should be designed in such a way that allows maximum transparency, but how is this transparency achieved? Designing the study to allow the access to raw digital data from devices. Maximizing and leveraging the available data can help the industry as a whole and there are already some excellent examples of this out in public domain like Mobilise-D, OWEAR and the Restore Center at Stanford. This data should be integrated an accessible to reduce future study burden and to empower the patient and the community.
4. Resistance to change!
The realization that ‘that’s just the way we do it around here’ no longer holds water. Bringing about change and modernizing how clinical trials are executed means using better data. How do we get better data? One way is to open up the recruitment, screening and enrollment into trials for everyone. What most in the industry could consider a secondary phenomenon to trial enrollment by the participant, may be a primary issue for them personally, for example; lack of diversity, fear, or distrust or misunderstanding about what happens with their data. While there are really good efforts to overcome this with information, the industry has a long way to go before transformational change happens because the old adage of ‘that’s just the we do it around here’ prevails.
One of the key goals of the DPHARM conference is the realization that digitization is here to stay. Researchers and those working in these roles now must ask themselves ‘is the current option the smartest?’, ‘is there an initiative to embrace to make processes better?’. If anything, this past year has demonstrated just how important clinical research is and how quickly the industry can adapt when the stakes are high.
Shimmer Research will be presenting at Model Agreements & Guidelines International (MAGI) Clinical Research vConference on November 02nd, as well at the IEEE 01ST International workshop on Wearable sensors and devices, Artificial Intelligence and Wearable markets, November 19th, 2020.
If you have any questions or thoughts about the DPHARM 2020 highlights discussed, please contact us at info@verisense.net.
