By Allison Proffitt

September 17, 2019 | BARCELONA—The SCOPE crowd gathered in Barcelona this morning to kick off the second annual Summit for Clinical Ops Executives, Europe. Amid Gaudi’s masterful architecture and under the glorious Mediterranean sun, it was fitting that the open plenary session focused on delight.

Koen Kas, founder and CEO of Healthskouts, challenged the SCOPE audience not to just serve patients and treat disease, but to seek health outcomes and promote delight.

The digital tools that are becoming increasingly available to us should reduce friction in business—and clinical trials are no different. We should be searching for friction spots to eliminate, not just trying to decide which tools to use. For instance, Kas pointed out, you can track a shipment using a major shipper and get location updates in near real time. Our patients, he said, are more than 8,000 hours removed from trials updates. How can we better connect research participants to their progress?

From apps to wearables to patches, Kas outlined a stream of new options that could all change the way we plan and envision clinical research. Biobeat is an FDA-approved wireless device that measures blood pressure accurately without a cuff. Lyrebird offers an API to add a real voice to a Google or Amazon digital voice assistant so that medication reminders, for example, can be broadcast in a recognizable voice. HowRyou is an app-based AI-driven pharmacy companion that can follow up with patients 3 days or so after beginning a new medication. Migraine Buddy is an award-winning app from Healint that tracks migraine triggers, progression, and response.

Each of these tools—and many more—seeks to remove friction from just one part of the care experience. Kas even challenged the audience to seek ways to communicate with emojis instead of long surveys. Could PROs be quickly delivered with smileys instead of words? "That's a pretty delightful way to do it!" he said.

Of course, Kas envisions an even broader future than just a series of apps smoothing the patient experience. "Real World Data is the new black," he joked, and has the power to create entirely new types of patient companions, or digital twins, Kas said. The goal is to collect plenty of data—but in a smart way, to collaborate across verticals and think boldly.

Kas advocates for the creation of a "digital twin," or patient avatar, that can serve as a stand-in for the first round of health interventions. "Don't mess with me," he joked. "Mess with the digital twin."

He's not alone in the vision. Health EU (pronounced "Healthy You") aims to build every European an avatar by 2030, Kas said, with enough data so that a doctor can predict the five most common diseases. The effort has the support of universities and research groups across Europe.

Of course collecting this breadth and depth of data raises the inevitable privacy questions. But Kas argues that we are thinking too small. "Think bigger than that!" By providing an experience individuals never expected and offering unexpected—delightful—benefits, privacy becomes less of a concern, he believes.