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Dr. Roni Zeiger, CEO

affiliation
SmartPatients
bio
Roni Zeiger is a judge for this challenge and the former Chief Health Strategist at Google, where he led efforts ranging from Google Flu Trends to Symptom Search. In 2012, he co-founded Smart Patients, an online community where patients and caregivers learn from each other about treatments, the latest science, and how it all fits into the context of their experience.
key insights
  • There is a huge opportunity for patient-driven, user-centered design to improve participation rates in clinical trials.
  • A challenge in the clinical trial space is the large number of stakeholders, each of whom have diverse and complex needs and constraints. In particular, legal and cultural constraints on researchers currently limit experimentation in clinical trial design and execution.
  • New initiatives should address a clear unmet need that will make participation in clinical trials easier and/or more rewarding.
  • Innovating on a specific clinical may require addressing expensive regulatory hurdles. Instead, an innovation can be tested in a hypothetical context and then we can extrapolate how it could implemented in collaboration with a clinical trial sponsor.
  • An inexpensive prototype should be designed to efficiently answer the question: if we can make this idea work, how much would people care? If the answer is 'not much', improve the idea and do more inexpensive prototyping before going further.

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