How Digital Technologies Revamp Drug Development Process

Life sciences companies are looking to implement a digital health strategy that can leverage patient-generated data from increasingly ubiquitous devices.

FREMONT, CA: Digital health is not only transforming the way patient data is gathered in healthcare, but it is disrupting the way the life sciences industry collects data from clinical trial participants. By equipping participants with wearable and medical devices, sensors, and mobile applications, life sciences companies can remotely gather activity data, along with vital biometrics. This stands to restructure the drug development process significantly, enabling companies to bring a drug to market more efficiently and cost-effectively while also enhancing the clinical trial participants’ experience by lowering the number of in-person visits and mitigating the need for manual tracking of data. Read on to know more.

Pharmaceutical companies face three significant challenges in recruiting participants for clinical trials; they are time, money, and ROI. Recruitment and enrollment take about one-third of the time allocated to the clinical trial, and most trials must extend their timelines because of difficulties finding enough patients. The majority of clinical trials do not enroll the target number of patients within the specified time. 

Enrollment times usually take twice as long as projected, which drives up drug development costs.

Digital health tools offer new options that may turn these discouraging numbers around. It is useful to track their activity using wearable devices. The process is remarkably seamless and showed a significant population of patients who were willing to self-quantify and share mobility data. Others have found digital health devices are useful for recruiting large people who are willing to participate in future trials and studies to help identify new research areas.  Wearable devices allow consumers to passively track their health data round the clock, including when they are sleeping, which makes sure the accuracy and timeliness of the information. With growing consumer adoption and the engagement wearable devices offer, they are the central point of a paradigm shift in clinical trials.

Digital health tools can also be harnesses to offer contextual information around prescription therapies, allowing researchers to better evaluate drug performance. Shortly, wearable devices will also be able to decide a participant’s adherence to the medication. In short, digital health can revolutionize how pharmaceutical and contract research organizations conduct the drug development process.

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