2026 DIA Global Annual Meeting: Stacy Hurt of Parexel on Federated AI, the Patient Voice, and Accountability for Patient Needs

Full interview summary

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials at the 2026 DIA Global Annual Meeting, Stacy Hurt, chief patient officer at Parexel, discussed how federated AI, early patient engagement, and organizational accountability are reshaping what it means to truly center patients in clinical development. She opened by drawing a compelling parallel between meeting patients where they are and meeting data where it is—arguing that federated AI's ability to aggregate information across institutions and community sites without centralizing it makes it a particularly powerful tool for oncology research. Because data stays with the patient and institutions that own it, she noted, privacy is preserved while diversity of representation is expanded.

On the patient voice, Hurt was direct: it gets lost most often at the very beginning of clinical development—which is precisely where it needs to be present. She described hearing consistently from patients that trial design too often requires them to upend their lives to participate, rather than being built around the realities of their lives from the start. Defining endpoints that are meaningful to patients, involving advocacy groups and people with lived experience at the inception of study design, and not waiting until a protocol is finalized—these are the interventions that make a real difference.

She closed with a pointed takeaway from her sessions: no one should assume someone else is looking after patient needs across clinical operations, data, or pharmacovigilance. That accountability has to be explicitly owned. She expressed pride in Parexel's decision to establish a chief patient officer role as a strategic function, describing it as a mechanism for pulling patient input through every stage of development—not as an afterthought, but as a core driver of how work gets done.