Written by:
Chief Digital Health Officer R&D, AstraZeneca
Unify Product Director, AstraZeneca
Head of IT, Digital Health & PMB, R&D IT, AstraZeneca
Think about the last time you went to the doctor’s office. Did you have to take time off work? Drive a long distance? Rearrange childcare?
This might be an inconvenient experience you deal with a couple of times a year, but for patients who participate in clinical research, this is a regular consideration. On top of managing their daily lives and potentially feeling unwell, patients who participate in trials have the added burden of frequent travel to trial sites to receive treatment and tests. We wanted to better understand how we could transform the clinical trial experience for patients and reimagine the approach with the patient at the centre.
Diagnosing the challenges with clinical trials
Clinical trials are necessary to drive innovation forward, yet only 3-5% of eligible patients choose to ever join a clinical trial. We spoke with hundreds of patients, caregivers and medical professionals to understand their barriers so we could work to overcome them. A clear theme emerged that patients prefer to receive non-urgent care at home. Similarly, busy healthcare professionals prefer to spend their time in clinic focusing their care on the patients who need it most.
“The explosion of digital technologies has created new avenues to meet patients where they are and transform how we develop our medicines,” said Cristina Duran, Chief Digital Health Officer R&D, AstraZeneca. “At AstraZeneca, we reviewed closed to 100 protocols and the data that we collected across all of our Therapy Areas and found 70% of that data could be collected in patients’ homes with clinically validated devices, illuminating a huge area of opportunity to be more patient-centred in the way we run our research programmes.”
Co-creating a solution with patients and medical professionals
Following a review of thousands of patients' comments and hundreds of digital solutions and their applicability to clinical trials, we developed Unify, a patient app and clinical trial support tool that is designed to deliver an optimal experience. Unify is our first transformative digital solution for clinical trials, virtually connecting all study participants. Unify was co-developed with patients and HCPs to create an optimal participant experience before, during and after a trial by:
- Engaging participants and caregivers, acknowledging how they are personally valued in helping to move medicine forward and enabling them to participate remotely throughout the study cycle
- Delivering a new paradigm for collecting patient data remotely and incorporating other digital methods which help improve patient care and decrease participant burden
- Improving scientific value from data and enabling novel endpoints, reducing
the time and size of a trial required to study a specific concept
“As the name implies, Unify brings together a range of apps, websites and devices into an easy-to-use single tool to enable data collection, streamline the experience for trial sites and support patients during the trial and beyond,” said Magnus Jörnten-Karlsson, Executive Product Director, Digital Health R&D, AstraZeneca. “Unify is designed to enhance the effectiveness of the patient/physician relationship to achieve the best clinical trial experience possible.”
To truly meet the needs of patients and physicians, Unify generates quality real-time data. Such data can provide optimal healthcare and improve patient outcomes by enabling physicians to tailor treatment when necessary and maintain care in both the real world and clinical trial setting.
Operating at scale
Unify officially launched in December 2020 and is already operating at scale across AstraZeneca, in more than 28 countries and available in 42 languages. In clinical trials using Unify, we are seeing encouraging early trends that indicate app usage may be associated with lower drop-out rate and higher patient compliance on questionnaires. We will monitor and validate these trends as we continue to collect more data. Unify provides relevant information for both patients and site teams, helping to reduce study related questions and enhance the study experience. The patient app already incorporates a suite of features, such as telehealth, direct to patient supply, medication reminders, remote data collection and connected devices, with more being added in response to patient and clinician feedback.
“Our hybrid technology platform approach at AstraZeneca has resulted in the ability to scale once we find a solution that meets the needs of patients and providers, implementing the best technology has to offer. We built Unify on a platform called BOOST that allows us to create reusable assets, meaning we can continue to deliver new digital experiences at speed and support Unify’s expanded service offerings and growth within our company,” said Liz Nevin, Head of IT - Digital Health R&D, Precision Medicine & BioSamples, AstraZeneca
The future of hybrid research
The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the willingness of patients to use technology as part of their care. Though these changes were catalysed by necessity during the pandemic, many of these behaviour changes and preferences will remain. To meet the needs of patients, we must continue to deliver frictionless trial experiences that fit seamlessly into their lives.
“Unify is a gold-standard example of the impact that digital health can have on patients, physicians and the entire healthcare system. We believe that tools like Unify will not only improve patient experience and outcomes, but also accelerate research, improve sustainability and reach more diverse patient populations,” said Duran. “It is our goal that at least 90% of our new trials are reviewed for digital strategy to continue bringing this healthcare revolution to patients at scale.”
Discover how Unify supports patients and healthcare providers across all our disease areas in the below video
