Patient-centric Approaches in Designing and Creating Products

ACT: How can sponsors embed patient and caregiver insights into product vision and design?

Birchard: I'm currently a product owner, and I love this question because in the product and design world, we use what's called design thinking, or human-centered design, and that really means we have to holistically understand how end users—and that's in our case, patients, caregivers, and sites—experience using our eCOA (electronic clinical outcome assessment) products. It's not just about our product, it's how they use our products in the world and in the environment that they live in. What are their worlds like outside of us and our products? That's how we really improve our products and a big part of this is you can't build a product in a vacuum, and you can't build a clinical trial in a vacuum. If you do, there will be consequences downstream, there will be barriers to end users, because you didn't consider all of the things that folks who actually are using the product encounter in their everyday lives. That's a really important piece of embedding these insights into product vision and clinical trial design is saying, well, these are the barriers that patients are currently facing, we want to make sure that whatever we're putting out into the world doesn't contribute to those barriers, but solves some of those issues and helps our end users do whatever they need to do in this this trial.

From the work that we've recently done—I've been living with type 1 diabetes for 30 years now—I was really lucky to be working on our glucometer feature. As someone with lived experience with diabetes, have my own thoughts and opinions about the design, and based on my own experience with the illness, but it was really important for us that it wasn't just me that was contributing to the product vision, because I'm one person, and so my insights are important. What was more important is that we had a diverse perspective of folks who live with diabetes—whether it's type 1 or type 2 or even people who haven't been diagnosed with illness—really look at our feature and give us feedback about what this looks like to a user, and again, from diverse perspectives, so that we could really make this as patient-centric as possible.