The Path to Informed eConsent for Clinical Research with Conversational AI

Recent advancements in AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) have caught the world’s attention and for good reason. It’s a big deal. 

Specialty pharmaceuticals are typically costly, sometimes ranging from $10,000 to over $5 million per patient, per year. The onboarding and approval process that come with these drugs are complex, requiring extensive effort from manufacturers and patients to get enrolled. Despite massive investments in people, processes, and systems, engagement remains a struggle for all.

In this episode of Digital Conversations, Greg Johnsen and Greg Kefer discuss the implications of bringing conversational technology to the specialty pharma industry and how digital assistants use smart, compliant language to interact with patients and guide them along their journeys from prescription moment to program enrollment to first fill, and beyond.

The full power of conversational AI is being unleashed on the world through a steady stream of technological advancements, such as ChatGPT. It’s only a matter of time before language becomes the dominant interface between humans and machines. The healthcare industry will become one of the prime beneficiaries of this technology leap forward.

In this episode of Digital Conversations, Greg Kefer was joined by Sonam Shah, Director of Product Management at Lifelink Systems, who is developing advanced conversational AI for large healthcare organizations. Sonam shares her perspectives on what it takes to deliver desired outcomes in the context of high patient satisfaction. She also provides insights on how to overcome the array of complexity and compliance hurdles that are so prevalent in healthcare.

Business intelligence is a cornerstone of every digital transformation, with businesses spending $140B per year in analytics software. As conversational AI and digital engagement technology matures, a new domain of performance insights is emerging with the ability to measure every moment of the interaction between a business and its customers.

In this episode, Greg Kefer and Justin Mardjuki discuss the implication of new conversation-level insights for the healthcare industry. As provider systems, payers, and pharmaceutical companies deploy new conversational engagement channels for their patients, how can they best track and measure patient interaction to drive program improvements?

Clinical research studies are increasing in numbers, they’re getting more complex, and they must be executed in a very challenging, tight labor environment. These are some of the key drivers of decentralized programs that use technology to lessen the burden of requiring patients to be physically present in order to participate. 

Despite advances in IT, informed consent — the linchpin moment between recruiting and participation — remains a challenge. In this episode, Justin Mardjuki and Greg Kefer discuss why eConsent is so hard, and how modern conversational technology may finally connect the dots by making the consent process easy for patients, while also satisfying multiple regulatory and collaboration requirements that research initiatives require.

Observational studies are designed to establish baseline data for diseases and treatments across broad patient populations. There are over 94,000 of them each year. Often, these studies go on for an extended period of time, which places challenges on study sponsors to keep participants engaged and motivated.

In this episode, Greg Kefer talks with Rob Chipperfield, a clinical study executive who has spent over a decade helping the world's leading research organizations design and operationalize real world studies. Digital engagement is the key to ensuring participants follow the protocols, provide feedback and not drop out. Mobile technology is vital, but study designers look for was to keep things very simple so participants stay engaged for the duration of the study. The low friction nature of Conversational AI may prove to be the ideal approach to keeping communication channels going through the duration of the study.

As medications get more specialized, so has the need for better engagement to help patients with their prescriptions. Manufacturers are investing in tools and programs that can help patients on their medication journeys, and digital strategies are front and center.

In this episode, Greg Kefer is joined by Emily Gibb, who leads the patient service organization at GSK, a global biopharma company with a purpose to unite science, technology, and talent to get ahead of disease together. In this wide-ranging discussion, Emily shares her thoughts about innovation and how modern, mobile technology is maturing and lowering barriers for patients. Ultimately, the goal is to provide a digital experience that is simple and natural, so patients can get the answers and support they need to stay healthy.

More than 37 million Americans have diabetes today and an additional 96 million adults have pre-diabetes. Access to insulin treatment for many is vital. But in the past 10 years, the cost of insulin has increased by more than 1000% which is driving one in every four people with diabetes to ration or skip doses of insulin. The government and private sector are taking aggressive action to lower pricing, but that may not be enough.

In this episode, Samir Khanna and Greg Kefer discuss the state of the diabetes situation and the initiatives that are in progress to address the insulin cost crisis. The cost of the drug is a key part of the solution. There’s also a massive patient communication challenge that will not be solved through traditional channels such as calling or e-mail. Tens of millions of people need to be engaged, educated, and guided to the right treatment and financial programs, and emerging conversational technology may be the only way to achieve the level of communication scale required.

Healthcare has become an expensive, clunky mess for everyone. The path forward has to be digital, but with labor shortages showing no signs of slowing down, the time has come to double down on innovation. The good news is that technology has matured to a place where it may finally be able to make a significant difference. 

In this episode, Shuo Qiao, Co-founder and CTO of Moving Analytics, and Greg Kefer had a discussion about transformative innovation in healthcare. More than 6 billion people from all corners of the globe own a smartphone today and that’s how we begin eliminating many of the physical and financial barriers to care. And those devices are only getting exponentially smarter. As billions of people embrace their personal devices as their digital hub for care navigation, the masses of data being collected are driving better training models for AI, which in turn delivers better prediction accuracy, smarter digital experiences, and ultimately, better outcomes at lower costs. 

The technology behind Conversational AI is maturing rapidly across all sectors as consumers increasingly relying on language to interact with their devices. The labor shortage that plagues most industries has set the stage for technology that powers digital conversations, and the sector that may benefit most is healthcare.

Anil Nair, Chief Technology Officer at Lifelink Systems, is developing conversational systems that can handle the millions of routine, administrative interactions that patients must deal with related to treatment and prescriptions. In this episode, Anil shares his perspective on what it will take to bring Conversational AI into the digital healthcare experience, while preserving the important, personal relationships between patients and their caregivers. The conversational platform of tomorrow will provide a mix of interoperability, analytics, and NLP with advanced design capacity that considers the “grammar” of digital interactions, and allows providers and life science companies to optimize each engagement to deliver results.

Billions of people are now fully dependent on various forms of technology as part of their daily lives. Healthcare is no exception. As paper forms give way to digital health records and electronic communications, the risks of losing control of private patient information has risen dramatically. Every organization that deals with healthcare data must come to grips with an increasingly challenging landscape of criminal sophistication and the constant flow of new regulations that are being put in place by international, federal, and local authorities.

In this episode, Greg Kefer is joined by Justin Wiley, Director of Information Security and Compliance at Lifelink Systems, to discuss the current state of compliance in healthcare IT. For any company that is involved in buying, selling, or delivering technology in healthcare, a sound approach to security and compliance has become table stakes. The industry can’t stand still. Digital innovation is more important than ever, but there are ways to ensure the technology being put in place has been vetted. Justin describes SOC 2, one of the “gold standard” audits, that dives deeply into technology organizations and how they operate, helping ensure best practices are in place and followed.