How Virtual Trials Support Patient-Centricity

By Jennifer Dennis-Wall, Ph.D., Sumit Bajracharya, MBA, and Thi Nguyen

“We asked patients what they wanted our industry to focus on, and we heard very clearly that they wanted us to stop concentrating solely on what we deliver and think about how we deliver it.

”Guy Yeoman, Vice President of Patient Centricity at AstraZeneca at the time, was quoted saying this regarding his and his colleagues’ 2017 publication on defining patient centricity. The idea is actually very simple. Does a patient’s medication come in one huge pill or two small pills, and can the patient perhaps be given the option between the two? Does the medication need to be refrigerated or can it sit out at room temperature? Sometimes the type of drug dictates these characteristics, but sometimes there are innovations in manufacturing that can make storage and consumption easier for patients.

According to many thought leaders, this type of thinking is going to revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry, which has in fact begun to turn its attention and efforts to developing more patient-centric approaches for drug development.

In this white paper, we propose how virtual trials may be able to solve all these issues at once while also providing the added benefit of reducing costs related to study sites. In this digital age, virtual trials may very well become the norm at some point in the future, but there are many questions to answer before this can become a reality.