Beyond Patient Centricity: What Rare Disease Research Gets Right

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.

Patients don’t experience primary endpoints, so trials that stop at biomarkers and rigid rating scales risk declaring success while leaving daily burden untouched, and digital tools only deliver meaningful evidence when they are co-designed with patients and deployed with restraint.

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.

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.

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 video interview, James Cheong, senior vice president of Asia Pacific at Precision for Medicine, explains how FDA inspection findings at APAC sites compare with those in the US and Europe, and why the common issues, such as informed consent versioning, are not unique to the region.

In this video interview, James Cheong, senior vice president of Asia Pacific at Precision for Medicine, explains how regulatory reform and inspection data contradict the view that APAC sites are slower or lower quality, and why sponsors need to update their assumptions.

In this video interview, Kent Thoelke, CEO of Paradigm Health, calls for safe harbor protections, CMS reimbursement safeguards, and funding mechanisms modeled on EHR meaningful use to help community and rural institutions participate in research on par with academic centers.