Every time we visit a general practitioner, go to the pharmacy or adopt wearable technology, we’re producing real-world health data. Even though the data is still fragmented, there’s a push to aggregate it and make it more actionable. Alex Bedenkov, Jim Weatherall, Melissa Grady, Alex Bishop, Ohad Goldberg, Ryan Walton, Irena Brookes-Smith and Timothy Geldard discuss their vision of a healthcare system transformed by real-world data.
Oscar Wilde famously stated, “Every good storyteller nowadays starts with the end.”
Central to the narrative of real-world data (RWD) is the patient – the ultimate destination along the journey of a medicine. However, this journey also begins with patients and their health data, whether collected and shared as part of clinical trials or routine care.
Each of us produces RWD continuously through our interactions with healthcare systems. Whether we visit our general practitioner, access a pharmacy, or adopt wearable technology, this data feeds into the continuum of product development, commercialisation, healthcare delivery and policymaking. As you read this article, take a moment to observe how many around you are wearing tech devices that monitor health and generate and share valuable RWD for our health data ecosystem.
Currently, our RWD landscape is fragmented, characterised by reactive, disconnected, and hospital-based healthcare. But fortunately, we are now witnessing a shift, with the rapid advancement of technology leading us towards a more coherent health data ecosystem at the population level. This evolution presents a remarkable opportunity for democratising the use of RWD, including the systematic, equitable and extensive application of RWD in the aggregate. The necessary technology and expertise are already available to transform our data-rich but action-poor ecosystem into a proactive, data-integrated framework.
Our team has been diligently working to harness this opportunity. For instance, our visual-first population-level RWD analytics platform – ATLAS – is operational across 13 countries and empowers healthcare practitioners and decision-makers to identify areas of unmet patient need, how medical products are being used and how patients are interacting with the healthcare system and their outcomes across various geographies and therapeutic areas, all by integrating targeted, region-specific, fit-for-purpose RWD to facilitate patient-centric decision-making.
RWD is a driving force in the healthcare (r)evolution, and we all have a role to play to unlock its power and full potential. Through RWD leadership and collaboration, we can:
- Pioneer advancements in science and technology, revolutionising study designs and accelerating trial delivery.
- Achieve better patient outcomes through proactive patient identification and the successful adoption of evidence-backed guidelines.
- Forge transformative partnerships that reshape healthcare provision and improve equitable access to innovation, contributing to resilient and sustainable systems.
The possibilities ahead are limitless. Our focus is now pivoting around four key areas in RWD leadership:
Drug discovery and study design for regulatory decision-making
RWD informs critical decisions at every stage of R&D. In early disease research, RWD provides insights into unmet medical needs and the complexities of comorbidities. In addition, RWD has guided our weight management combination therapy strategy for patient population selection.
Moreover, leveraging RWD helps reduce the costs and time associated with clinical trials, facilitating faster delivery of innovative medicines to patients. A notable illustration of this is our novel study design for an asthma product. Despite its initial approval for adults, there was a critical need to address adolescent patients. Traditional trial timelines would have delayed benefits for today’s adolescents until they reach adulthood. By utilising US health insurance claims data, we examined real-world medication usage patterns, allowing us to bridge adult trial data with a streamlined, smaller trial in adolescents. This approach not only achieved substantial cost savings but also expedited study delivery.
Transforming clinical trial delivery
The complexities of running clinical trials today necessitate innovation and a data-driven strategy. The challenges associated with patient recruitment consume vast resources, particularly given the increased competition for clinical sites. Selecting the right sites from the outset is crucial to ensuring successful trial delivery. Our experience employing robust RWD analytics empowers us to refine site selection and patient recruitment strategies effectively.
By collaborating cross-functionally and utilising the best available RWD—encompassing disease burden, prescribing patterns, and treatment outcomes – we can unlock unprecedented acceleration in our research. For example, we identified eighty high-potential sites in the UK alone for a priority study in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease by consolidating and analysing site-specific RWD.
Turbocharging clinical impact
RWD opens unique avenues to expedite access to medicines and elevate patient care standards. By utilising our product-agnostic, location-relevant RWD platform, ATLAS, we provide healthcare practitioners and clinics with actionable insights to tackle local challenges and seize opportunities to boost the adoption of evidence-based clinical guidelines through insights generated from RWD that are specific to their region or catchment area.
In Germany, our team has integrated RWD into their business model through a stepwise process, fostering shared ownership and advocating for improved care management for severe asthma patients and beyond. Notably, our analysis revealed a correlation between clinical trial participation and enhanced adherence to guideline-directed medical therapy (GDMT), highlighting the potential to raise care standards and ensure that our clinical research programmes have a wider impact.
Strengthening healthcare leadership
We are evolving from a transactional to a trusted public-private partnership model by understanding the priorities and barriers faced by individual health systems and leveraging our collective expertise, and shared access to RWD, to address them. These efforts range from programmes that work directly with health systems to address care barriers to working with policy leaders to understand the most critical areas of need at a national level, and design data-backed innovative policies to address these gaps Our RWD efforts serve as the foundation for these trusted partnerships aimed at improving healthcare delivery and transforming patient outcomes.
A prime example is our joint RWD research centre with Tel Aviv University which aims to seamlessly link healthcare needs with comprehensive Israeli RWD through long-term partnerships between industry, academia and health management organisations. This collaboration, entitled Beam, operates as a next-gen RWD research engine benefiting all partners involved, while ensuring efficiency and compliance with privacy laws. A striking example of our success is an observational study on the characteristics and management outcomes of poorly controlled hypertension patients, completed in just one month, quickly feeding insights back into patient care and health policy strategy, both locally and globally.
Conclusion
RWD is more than data; powered by AI and machine learning, it is the lifeblood of healthcare transformation. By pioneering advances in science, fostering partnerships and integrating RWD into our strategic framework, we are poised to redefine healthcare and enhance patient outcomes. Through transformative partnerships, our commitment to jointly unlocking RWD will shape the future of healthcare, allowing us to fully realise the potential of the health data ecosystem.
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- This blog post represents the views of its author(s), not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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