AI in Action: The Key to Patient-Centric Approaches

Jonathan Gardow, VP of Business Development at FOMAT Medical Research, shares insights into the strategies that earned FOMAT recognition for their patient-centric approach to clinical research. Hear about FOMAT’s innovative use of AI-powered tools like their virtual assistant "Lucy," AI-driven voiceovers, and automated text messaging to enhance patient engagement and retention. Learn how these technologies streamline operations, build trust, and boost efficiency while preserving meaningful human connections. Additionally, Jonathan explores the expanding role of AI in clinical trials, offering practical advice for sites looking to adopt emerging solutions.

Transcript

Jimmy Bechtel: 0:00

Welcome to SCRS Talks provided by the Society for Clinical Research Sites. Thank you for joining us as we explore the latest insights, trends, and innovations shaping clinical research today. I'm Jimmy Bechtel, the Vice President of Site Engagement with the Society, and today I'm joined by John Gardow, the Vice President of Business Development with FOMAT medical research. FOMAT was this year's recipient of the patient centricity award at the 2024 global site solution summit just this past October, and I'm excited to speak with you, John, to dive in a little bit and learn more about why you all won this award. It was made obvious to us there on site, but I'm sure our listeners are all excited to learn some of the great work that you all are doing in terms of patient centricity, but before we get into the meat of our conversation today, and again, learning more about what you all were doing in that space and continue to innovate on, I'd love to first learn a little bit more about you and of course, a little bit more about FOMAT.

Jonathan Gardow: 0:59

Thanks, Jimmy. So first and foremost, on behalf of FOMAT again, thank you for having me on here. Thank you to SCRS for all the great work you guys are doing in illuminating us at the site level. And also thank you to Sanofi for sponsoring this award and giving us a platform to discuss the innovative work we're doing. So I'm one of FOMAT's most recent additions to the team. I actually joined the organization back in July to lead our business development efforts. My role at FOMAT encompasses opening up new and expanding upon existing partnerships, as well as introducing a unique component to our outreach strategy, which aligns with our centers of excellence. Our goal at FOMAT is to let every sponsor and CRO know about our capabilities, whether they have an ongoing trial or not. I've felt for a long time that most sites, you know, in the industry, it's very reactive. So basically, when a study hits clinicaltrials. gov, everyone pounces, we aim to be at the forefront of upcoming study discussions. Regarding FOMATs, if you're not familiar with us, as you alluded to, we're an integrated research organization, IRO for short, in California, spanning 51 locations and partnering with 26 principal investigators. We function in almost every therapeutic area and have access to an EMR database of over I think it's 522, 000 potential participants and growing at the moment. One of the areas we're most widely known for is our extremely diverse patient populations. For years, FOMAT has sought out locations of underserved communities and partnered with physicians offices and practices specifically in what has been referred to as healthcare deserts. So for much of our patient community, sometimes research is. One of the only care options they actually have access to, but our approach as an IRO helps us to reduce the barrier of entry into clinical trials for underrepresented communities, you know, which we all know is extremely high. But where I believe our model succeeds and stands out is that our PI partners have been seeing these potential subjects for years. There's a level of trust built in the relationship already makes the introduce the introduction of a clinical study easier and it helps us retain the participant a little bit longer. So, that would be a brief intro of me, FOMAT, and what we're doing here.

Jimmy Bechtel: 3:04

Great. Thanks, John. And again, congratulations to you all and the team at FOMAT for winning the 2024 Excellence in Patient Centricity Award. And I know that the foundation of that, kind of the why, what you all did, the why and the what, you've developed an AI powered engagement platform and virtual assistant that you've named Lucy to enhance those patient interactions and, and do what you can to serve them as Best as you can. So I want to start things off by having you share a little bit of the impact that these tools have had on patient satisfaction and engagement. I'm sure you guys have done a great amount of work in measurement of the outcomes of your investment into these kinds of tools. So again, share a little bit about what you've learned from this so far.

Jonathan Gardow: 3:47

Yeah, sure. So Lucy is our AI driven answering machine. It's such an interesting concept to talk about as I'm old enough to remember the Brown cassette tape boxes in the hallways that recorded messages for us so many years ago. But the impact, so from a user patient experience or maybe just humanity in general, I think it's very normal to wonder if, and when you'll ever get a response to a message. Lucy automatically answers a call and gives a message that identifies itself as Lucy, our AI assistant, which then prompts them for the reason for the call. So in this case, it's going to be a response to an ongoing enrolling study that the participants learned about from our community engagement team, or maybe our patient recruitment team. But the prompt acts to reassert, reassure the participant that the message is going to be passed along to a member of our internal support team. Prior to Lucy, it would take our patient recruitment team a significant amount of time each day to listen to voicemails and respond. Lucy has streamlined that approach in that when our recruitment team follows up, they're calling in a more meaningful way to foster trust and focus on building relationships, convey understanding regarding what the patient's going through at the moment Lucy is also a cost effective solution to reduce the staff time burden. Essentially, it's the old do more with less concept. Lucy provides our internal teams with a transcript of the call and that participant is interested in clinical studies when they want to learn more. So it's been highly successful on that front. But to answer your question directly, the impact of Lucy has been significant. It's improved our engagement rates, reduced time lapse between initial contact and follow up, you know, by ensuring near immediate and effective communication. We've been able to enhance the patient's journey through the trial process and increasing satisfaction and retention rates along the way. Not only Lucy, but the other technologies I'll mention later on helps manage resources more efficiently, but more importantly, It ensures that the human interactions are more focused and more impactful.

Jimmy Bechtel: 5:48

There's a lot of really cool things about this. John one is obviously the innovative use of AI. There's been so much conversation and there continues to be, and there probably will continue to be into the years to come about resolving this question mark that exists around how we are going to integrate AI into our clinical trials. And I think a lot of people conceive really obvious answers, right? The chart review site selection, patient selection. There's a lot of this, but this is really kind of different. Very, very out of the box thinking. And it's no wonder that you guys were recipients of this year's reward. And I, I also. Want to emphasize the point that you haven't eliminated the patient to person contact through this process. You've augmented it. And that's really what using tools like AI and technology is all about. How do we use them to augment the work that we do and provide efficiencies? And then it sounds like that's exactly what your patient engagement platform, Lucy has been able to do.

Jonathan Gardow: 6:48

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Can I talk about our our AI powered voiceovers too?

Jimmy Bechtel: 6:53

Yeah. Yeah. I, I know that's been part of it, right? You've utilized these in your social media ads and it's been complex to really simplify some of that complex work rather. So yeah. Share a little bit about that. What inspired that approach? And again, sharing some of the outcomes there. What have you guys learned?

Jonathan Gardow: 7:11

Yeah, so yeah, and I asked that because interestingly enough, we actually find our voiceovers to be even more impressive than Lucy is as it pertains to meaningful engagement with clinical studies. And I think what you mentioned, Jimmy, regarding the augmentation of our existing services, what's really, really important. So for all of our Facebook ads, for the longest time, we've had static images, maybe some brief texts, some background music but we're getting some leads for anybody's who's online. Then I'll tell you that if the lead, if the ad is talking directly to you, it's more effective than simply just reading the text, especially within clinical trials. There's so much info that needs to be relayed. To do that over text may, you know, turn someone off, may tune someone out, they lose interest, they don't have the time. So we've engaged a software, it's a visual ad if you will, with exceptionally real sounding voices, has so many languages built into it, has a myriad of voices you can choose from, male, female dialects it's got avatars too, you can tell it to be sad, you can tell it to be curious, you can change its emotions, it's extremely accurate. Right. But it has been so much more effective than starting an ad that says Hey, are you in Santa Maria or hola, estás en Santa Maria? Sorry, my Spanish is terrible, but when you combine the engaging voice with good videos, it's been so much more effective. Some data that we've retrieved, the outcomes we've been able to record was a 65. 67 percent reduction in the number of voicemails over a period of three months where we tested it for April, May, as well as June by collected data. It's contributed greatly to operational efficiency across our patient recruitment, and we believe enhanced the patient's experience as well, which, you know, in essence is the most important, but we've seen outcomes such as more leads being generated at lower cost. Prior to utilizing this tool, we could dump 2, 000 into an ad and it would generate maybe 75 leads. Now with the tool, it's not uncommon to more than double our leads generated because of the better patient engagement platform, but in summation, you know, the simple breakdown of the benefits to the AI platforms that we've talked about so far, you know, it's all about increased operational efficiency for our internal teams. More engaging and a more mindful patient journey experience as more as as well as a more quality subject lead leading to higher retention levels. I would say.

Jimmy Bechtel: 9:33

That's great, John. It's so cool to hear again, the stories of success with augmentation. And the other cool thing that I suspect is you don't have, it's not necessarily a person, I guess I should say it this way. AI has the ability to help better understand how to make those touch points, those posts, those social media ads more effective because it has. And is able to analyze a larger data set and information and learn from a, from a broader perspective versus a traditional approach of a person or an account representative or, you know, some, some, some Gen Z or in the at one of these ad agencies. With their knowledge, trying to make these ads work or you know, or someone at the site who's trying to do this as well, who isn't necessarily a social media expert. So there's so much to your point of operational efficiency. There's so much that can come out of this and so much learning and what we can do here that really sets this apart and, and kind of exponentially. Right. Provides those efficiencies. It's, it's awesome to hear. Absolutely. Absolutely. We're, we're, we're seeing John a lot more sites. You're being one of them adopt AI for patient engagement in a variety of different ways. That's the direction that we're heading as an industry. So how. Kind of being at some of the truly some of the forefront of this. How do you see AI evolving within clinical trials? And, and, you know, not only in the space that you're in with patient centricity and patient engagement, but maybe some of your thoughts on other ways as well, if you have them.

Jonathan Gardow: 11:02

Yeah. So it's no secret that AI is transforming the way that literally every industry does business. In some instances. It's putting some businesses out of business. Hey, one, one really quick thing though, Jimmy, just for all the listeners as well, before I comment on the evolution, there's a, there is just one last AI platform that we use. It's a text messaging service. I wanted to talk about that we've adopted that's going to help with conversations in case anyone else is unaware of these technologies out there, but basically to get a lead to follow through with your interest, you have to establish contact as soon as possible. Ideally within a couple of minutes, as soon as they sign up. We get a form that directly comes into our CRM system and within minutes they're getting contacted by our AI solution. You know, thanking them for their interest, telling them a bit about who we are, looking to schedule a pre qualification call. This has extremely reduced our contact time and communication in a way that was not so robotic. You know, it understands their responses. It helps with scheduling. It's asking them when they're available. I just wanted to mention that really quick as well in case anyone else is, is looking for an option like that. But regarding the evolution of AI and studies, Jimmy, let me give you two. So two quick examples come to mind. And I like to recite these two examples and talk about them because everything we do at FOMAT is with the patient in mind here. So, recently, I saw Medidata just put out a YouTube video on Digital20, as it relates to the patient experience. They're integrating AI, and I think they called it Simulants please correct me if I'm wrong, but, They're creating AI constructs of the patient. By the way, I'm in no way paid by Medidata to represent them or anything. I just wanted to talk about this specific example. But they say they can or will be able to replace entire arms of research. It's quite amazing. Reducing the burden on participants I think is absolutely fantastic. When you start talking about placebo controlled arms, it'd be great to have a predictive engine behind it. So that's just one example that I've heard recently of another way AI is being adopted and integrated into clinical trials. I also watched a TED talk from a Harvard professor on the cost of modern clinical trials, where he believed that AI will change the gold standard of how drugs are going to be developed in the future. Remembering back he cited, I think it was the Janssen COVID 19 study with their specific AI driven tool that they created what they, they created. It was fantastic. He said they created multiple possible futures. alternate universes, if you will. Crazy, right? Very sci fi stuff, but their platform was critical to informing them on where to run the studies and what locations and that accelerated the trial. It reduced the study length by 33 percent and it needed fewer participants, but pertaining to diversity and new OEM guidelines, it resulted in the most diverse patient population in a COVID study at the time. So imagine this program being adopted for all drug development, you know, I've heard everything from 10 years and 10 billion average statistics to bring drugs to market. I've heard 5 years and 1 billion pick your poison either way. The end result is whatever we can do to reduce the cost of drug development is only a net positive for the population. These are just two examples of how organizations are adopting AI to advance clinical trials and research studies. very much. Humanity hasn't, at least from what I believe, even scratched the surface of what AI can do for us. The way we at FOMAT are adopting AI at the moment could be completely different than how others are doing it. There's just so many applications we haven't even discovered yet, but for a while now we've kept our secret sauce, I'm doing air quotes, you can't see, we've kept our secret sauce close to the chest, but You know, just as we're bringing clinical research to underserved communities to get the word out, we want to get the word out to our community on how we're adopting AI to improve the patient experience globally, how it can speed up drug delivery, how it can lower the cost of healthcare. And just do so much more by embracing these technologies.

Jimmy Bechtel: 14:58

Those are some great examples, John. Yeah, this concept of for lack of better term, right. Medidata calls it one thing and several others. It's this kind of like artificial control arm, right? It's using data to effectively replace the need for the unknowns that exist around patients in clinical trials and probably a topic for another time. I'm sure we could dive into that on a different podcast, but interesting nonetheless, and, and a really strong use case for kind of sci fi use of AI in our clinical trials, which is really, really interesting. John, I do want to begin to wrap our conversation up here, but I do want to to end us on kind of a look into the future and some tips and information that the sites can take away from these conversations. So what tips do you have for sites looking to implement similar tools or AI, or, you know, maybe even just in general, kind of that concept of innovation with technology at their site specifically for improving AI, patient engagement and I guess the age old question, right? The cliche question is here. Where do we start? How do we get started in this? And what, what are the steps that we might need to take coming from an organization who has obviously found great success in being truly innovative?

Jonathan Gardow: 16:11

Oh boy. I would say the first step or tip would be to get a great team around you. We're so focused in our, in our divisional capacity on one thing that to jump out of it and identify these platforms and solutions can be daunting. You know, as I discussed earlier, FOMAT has adopted our specific AI solutions to suit our specific needs. Lucy and our various platforms are just a few ways sites are adopting AI, but there's so many other options out there. So our community engagement and marketing guru, Joseph Navarro, is constantly looking for ways to reach out to our communities. We've been preaching about patient centricity for so long now across the community that to gain access and to reach these potential subjects is absolutely paramount of about what we do. Another tip would be to keep your eyes open for new tools out there that's going to advance your organization. Do your research, proactive research, attend conferences, not, not just study related conferences. Remember, as I said, Lucy was not created as a clinical platform. It's simply how we adopted Lucy to meet our needs. What was innovative about our approach is that everything we use today. has been adopted for our methodology. I cannot stress this enough. Even if I say go here, buy this, implement this, it's going to take a curious and creative person to look at a platform and say, Hey, this is good, but if we use it in this capacity, it could be a game changer. And that's, that's what Joseph did for FOMAT. And that's what he's doing, moving us forward. As a premier site organization we're only going to get more exponential adoption surrounding these technologies. I envision a world where platforms will be created even more than they already are specifically designed for the clinical research industry. Keep your eyes open and keep your mind open attend conferences. You know, I remember going to a conference. I think it was a couple of years ago where I turned down one specific aisle and 50 percent of the booths were all patient recruitment companies. I said, Oh, my God, where did these all come from? Ultimately we'll get to the point where there's going to be a platform on every single aisle and it'll be specifically designed for clinical research. So, I would say if your site's not there yet, if you're interested in getting into it, you're not late to the dance. I'd classify FOMAT as early adopters. It will be on your doorstep very, very soon.

Jimmy Bechtel: 18:23

I think that's an excellent place for us to conclude our conversation here, John. I can't emphasize enough the value of the steps that you laid out, right? Get that good team around you. That's the foundation for any success with any type of innovation technology or not. And I think it's always a good reminder for us to hear. But the other great point here is it's common these technology AI, it's. It's not going to go away. We're going to continue to find new and unique ways for it to integrate into our daily lives and our work. And it's great to hear the success stories of organizations like yours and how we can use it for good and, and where it can have positive change. So thank you. And thank you for being here with us today. Thank you for sharing the conversation. And again, a big congratulations to FOMAT and, and the work that you're doing here. Can't wait to see more. And what's next for you guys.

Jonathan Gardow: 19:12

Absolutely. Thank you so much for giving us a platform, Jimmy, and, you know, helping other organizations come into this trend, so to speak.

Jimmy Bechtel: 19:19

Definitely. I can't wait to see what's next in this space. I want to make sure that everyone listening doesn't forget to explore other site focused resources in addition to SCRS Talks made available through all of our various publications and webinar opportunities on our website, myscrs. org You'll also there find a wealth of content and details about upcoming engagement and connection opportunities like our site solutions summits with various partners, like the ones we talked with today. Thanks again for listening and tuning in and until next time.