Recently, our team had the opportunity to attend the “Forming new evidence research collaborations around digital health interventions.” The event was organised by the excellent team at DigitalHealth.London and held at the Health Foundry in London. The event combined digital health companies and researchers to foster new research collaborations.

We heard from a panel of digital health companies and their advances in digital health. Among the panel were Ian Prangley from Track Active, Elliott Engers from Infinity Health, and Oliver Armitage from BIOS, leaders of small to medium enterprises (SMEs). The discussion heavily focused on how crucial it is to have clinical evidence when testing new innovations on patients and how without constant evaluation, it is very difficult to compare the effectiveness of the new technology, centred innovation, with the original processes and treatment.

Even though both clinical and commercial evidence is vital for digital health, it is often neglected having only been truly explored at a late stage in a project. Each panel member agreed that evaluation methods should be curated into projects at the beginning, in order to ensure quality in recording the progress and efficiency of projects.

We have a strong track record of putting the value we create with our partners, at the front and centre of our projects. For patient focussed solutions, such as patient adherence programmes, we look at every aspect of the solution through the eyes of how to improve the outcome for the patient. We work with our partners to define how we track and measure progress against this, only formally starting a project until we’ve aligned and agreed. This enables us to design and build the reporting and analytics required, including understanding who needs to see what data and when, at the very beginning of the project.

This may appear an extreme approach but putting in place this stage-gate effectively means we can not start on a new programme until the entire team is aligned on how we will measure its effectiveness. We believe that only through doing it this way are we able to ruthlessly keep the user, albeit the patient or physicians at the heart of our decision making.