Clinical Trials in 2026: Trends Shaping the Year Ahead

In this video interview, Kent Thoelke, CEO of Paradigm Health, explains why patients in community and rural settings too often lack access to clinical research as a care option, and how closing that gap could improve outcomes and lower long-term costs.

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.

Medical writing capacity pressure is fundamentally a talent development problem, not a technology problem, since hybrid resourcing and AI cannot substitute for the experienced judgment needed to review AI output and mentor the next generation of writers.

In this video interview, Kent Thoelke, CEO of Paradigm Health, explains why patient cost barriers and site infrastructure challenges must be solved together to close the participation gap in community and rural clinical trials.

In this video interview, Rajneesh Patil, global head of AI, digital, and innovation in clinical development at Syneos Health, argues that CROs must act as orchestrators rather than aggregators—and that the real test of any AI ecosystem is whether it reduces sponsor coordination burden or just hands it back to them.

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.

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 video interview, Kent Thoelke, CEO of Paradigm Health, describes how manual eligibility screening and swivel-chair data entry force community sites to trade billable patient care for research, and why that burden is so hard to absorb.