By Clinical Informatics News Staff 

November 15, 2017 | Finalists have been announced for the SCOPE’s 2018 Participant Engagement Award, an annual award given at the Summit for Clinical Ops Executives (SCOPE) to recognize innovation, and change in how the industry communicates with participants in the fields of recruitment and retention in clinical trials. Greenphire; Clara Health; GRYT Health; Brite Health; and mProve Health with Pfizer will compete for the grand prizes live at SCOPE in Orlando, Florida, on February 14.  

The SCOPE Participant Engagement Awards were meant to combat a common problem at industry conferences, David Sall, President & CEO, Patient Enrollment Advisors and co-creator of the program told Clinical Informatics News. “Everyone talks about their innovation, but no one tells you what the innovation is!”

Sall and Kelly McKee, an advisor on clinical innovation at Eli Lilly and Company, created the awards program to change that.

“Our goal was to highlight true innovation in engagement in clinical trials and be able to really show it to our colleagues and peers, so they can get something out of it and bring it back to their own colleagues and trials,” Sall explained. 

Unlike awards programs where winners are announced, but the details of the entries are not available, the SCOPE Participant Engagement Award includes a live pitch and judging component. Finalists are chosen by a panel of judges, and they present their entries live to the audience at SCOPE. The judges, then, can ask questions of the entries in the public forum.

The groups in the hot seat—and their projects—include:

• Greenphire - Hope for Houston
• Clara Health - Breakthrough Crew: Demystifying Clinical Trials Alongside Patient Advocates
• GRYT Health Inc - Empowering patients to connect with peers and new treatment options
• Brite Health - Improving patient experience, compliance, and retention using data-driven technology
• mProve Health with Pfizer - Patient Engagement Hub

In addition to Sall, McKee, and Micah Leiberman, Executive Director, Conferences, Cambridge Healthtech Institute, the judges for the 2018 competition are Jeri Burtchell, Director, Patient Initiatives, HealthiVibe; Shwen Gwee, Head of Digital Strategy, Global Clinical Operations Biogen; and Angela Radcliffe, Managing Director, Executive VP FCBVIO.

McKee will serve as the host for the competition; Sall, Burtchell, Gwee, and Radcliffe will judge the presentations on stage. “It was really a very exciting piece of the conference last year,” Sall said. “People got very into it.”

#BeLikeJerry

The finalists this year represent everything from apps to patient communities to precision medicine initiatives, Sall said. There were entries addressing needed diversity in clinical trial populations, and an entry born out of an urgent need in Houston after Hurricane Harvey. The competition field this year represents, “a pretty broad range of innovation,” Sall said.

Last year’s 2017 competition was the inaugural event. The first place winner was “aBuzz aBout Clinical Trials,” an effort to engage the public in clinical trials through a BuzzFeed article. The effort was conceived by Jerry Matczak of Eli Lilly and Company, and received over 166,000 views and delivered over 3,500 click outs to Lilly TrialGuide.

Matczak was a longstanding member of the SCOPE community and an advocate for participant engagement. Sadly, he passed away soon after receiving the 2017 award, and the 2018 award is dedicated to his memory. “We dedicate this award to Jerry in the hopes that it will serve as a reminder of his ideals and accomplishments,” said Leiberman.

You can follow the 2018 awards on Twitter using the greater event hashtag—#SCOPE2018—or one specific to the awards: #BeLikeJerry. You can learn more about the event at www.scopesummit.com