Clinical Trials in 2026: Trends Shaping the Year Ahead

In this video interview, Kent Thoelke, CEO of Paradigm Health, explains why patient cost barriers and site infrastructure challenges must be solved together to close the participation gap in community and rural clinical trials.

In this video interview, Rajneesh Patil, global head of AI, digital, and innovation in clinical development at Syneos Health, argues that CROs must act as orchestrators rather than aggregators—and that the real test of any AI ecosystem is whether it reduces sponsor coordination burden or just hands it back to them.

Patients don’t experience primary endpoints, so trials that stop at biomarkers and rigid rating scales risk declaring success while leaving daily burden untouched, and digital tools only deliver meaningful evidence when they are co-designed with patients and deployed with restraint.

Standardized measurement across five oncology centers found that clinical research coordinators rated eSource-enabled workflows positively (Overall Mean Satisfaction 5.79 of 7), with reduced manual entry and electronic data transfer earning strong marks, while perceived reduction in sponsor and monitor queries lagged as the one domain below threshold.

In this video interview, Rajneesh Patil, global head of AI, digital, and innovation in clinical development at Syneos Health, describes the industry’s trajectory toward a unified intelligence orchestration environment—and explains why the future isn’t one model that knows everything, but a trusted system that brings the right evidence to the right human decision.

Pacing obesity trial enrollment, anchoring eligibility to stable real-world therapies, and building site and physician relationships improve retention and data quality more than aggressive recruitment or restrictive exclusion criteria do.

In this video interview, Rajneesh Patil, global head of AI, digital, and innovation in clinical development at Syneos Health, identifies three recurring failure modes in AI governance frameworks—and explains why responsible AI must be an ongoing operating discipline, not a one-time approval gate.

In this video interview, Rajneesh Patil, global head of AI, digital, and innovation in clinical development at Syneos Health, explains why the shift from narrow AI tools to a continuous learning clinical operating system is where the real operational value lies—and what it takes to get there.