Trust, Technology, and the Patient-Site Relationship: Q&A with Andrea Valente, uMotif

As the industry doubles down on patient centricity, the relationship between participants and sites remains one of the most consequential—and least consistently addressed—variables in trial execution.

To explore this further, Applied Clinical Trials spoke with Andrea Valente, CEO of uMotif, ahead of the 2026 DPHARM conference, about how educating patients and sites together changes compliance and care quality, where technology is creating opportunity rather than just complexity, and why mapping the full patient journey has to be a design input rather than an afterthought.

ACT: What trends or conversations are you looking forward to at DPHARM, particularly around the patient-site relationship?

Valente: One of the things I believe is an important dimension is understanding not only how trust between the patient and the site is fostered, but how it can be enhanced in the clinical trial. There are methods that I believe can help with that—being able to educate the site and the participant effectively in how they both participate in the clinical trial, not only independently but together. I think that's really important to ensure that the participant is compliant, the site is able to actually serve the participant effectively, and the outcomes the sponsor wants to achieve are realized.

I'll be interested to see where the focus lies when I get to DPHARM. I suspect AI will be an interesting part of the equation overall. I don't know if that will apply directly to the relationship between the participant and the site, but I think there are applications for AI—not necessarily in the interaction itself, but in areas like looking at behavior patterns that could be applied and improved for use by the sponsor.

ACT: How is technology changing what sites can realistically deliver for patients in today's trial environment?

Valente: It's really difficult, and it's something I discuss quite extensively with Ken Getz at the Tufts Center for Drug Development—we actually have a webinar coming up in November on this topic. Sites are required to use a lot of different systems, figure out how to collect and process data, and manage the relationship with the participant. Their focus is not as equally aligned as the sponsor's, let's just say. So how can we make that relationship stronger by leveraging technology?

The answer, to me, is not only making technology easier to use, but also making it easier for the patient and the site to interact more effectively together. That is still a challenge, and I think it's an area of real opportunity.

ACT: Where do you see the biggest gaps still being left unaddressed as the industry pushes toward more patient-centered models?

Valente: One of the areas we've been focused on quite extensively is really being able to understand the patient journey more effectively from beginning to end—and being able to bring that to the forefront and incorporate it into study design, but also to affect it within the technology being used to collect data.

One of the things we do quite a lot of is conducting workshops with our sponsor partners around that patient journey—being able to create a level of engagement that is meaningful for the participant so that not only do they feel like they are participating themselves, but they're actually gaining value from that interaction and from that experience. To me and to my team, that is really important to achieve not only the outcomes a participant would like to see, but also what the sponsor wants.