Applied Clinical Trials at the 2026 DIA Global Annual Meeting: Conversations on Data, Outsourcing, and the Patient Voice

The FDA’s RTCT initiative transmits predefined, clinically meaningful signals to regulators during active trials, so its value depends entirely on the maturity of sponsors’ upstream RBQM signal intelligence, KRIs, QTLs, and root-cause context, rather than on data speed.

In this Q&A, Rajneesh Patil, global head of AI, digital, and innovation in clinical development at Syneos Health, discusses what changes when AI is embedded across protocol strategy, data infrastructure, and workflow tools at once, where governance frameworks tend to fall short, and why CROs must orchestrate AI ecosystems rather than simply aggregate them.

In this Q&A, Kent Thoelke, CEO of Paradigm Health, discusses why participation gaps in community and rural settings come down to both patient cost barriers and site infrastructure, how legacy workflows weigh on community clinics, and what policy and technology changes it would take to make clinical research a real care option for more patients.

Neuroscience trials struggle to show benefit because symptoms are subjective and variable, and eCOA strengthens dossiers by standardizing ClinRO administration, capturing outcomes in real time to reduce recall bias, and adding patient and caregiver perspectives that clinician scales miss.

Community participation gaps look less like a question of patient willingness and more like a financing and infrastructure problem that no single bill has yet solved.

AI can draft a CSR in minutes, but the report only reflects evidence that has already converged, so faster drafting shifts the bottleneck to upstream reconciliation, database-lock readiness, and human accountability rather than shortening the trial itself.

In this Q&A, E.K. Koh, chief product officer at Suvoda, discusses what separates a trustworthy AI assistant from one that adds risk, why curated clinical knowledge matters more than general-purpose flexibility, and what safeguards must be in place when assistants move from answering questions to taking actions in clinical trial systems.

In this video interview, Kent Thoelke, CEO of Paradigm Health, outlines why anti-kickback guidance and modern EHR-integrated trial matching technology must work in tandem to reach representative patient populations at the community level.