Is Real World Evidence replacing clinical trials?

Wearables, sensors, mobile health and social media are all set to have an impact on the pharma sector.

Big Pharma is already showing interest in leveraging wearable technology as an alternative to clinical trials. Real world evidence in this context is having a particularly strong impact.

A new whitepaper has been released to help the pharma sector with the transition to a more connected platform. Real World Evidence and Digital Healthcare: The Next Frontier features contributions from Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Sanofi on the challenges facing the sector – as well as the opportunities.

The limitations of traditional clinical trials in drug development are well known. Put-simply, they don’t usually account for many external factors likely to affect patient health.

Harnessing connected wearables to allow participants to function as normal in the real world, collecting data and sending the results back to the lab is likely to give a clearer picture of the effectiveness of certain drugs.

The whitepaper adds that in drug development for rare disease, where it can be hard to find subjects, a simple opt-in tag function in operation across healthcare facilities could maximise the volume of data on offer.

In the case of social media, the picture is less clear. However, disease outbreaks have already been predicted via twitter in the past, and market analysts are known to be ‘listening’ to online chatter to spot new trends in consumer purchasing – this extends to drugs and devices.

The whitepaper is free to download, and can be found here.