Bayer, LINK, 2014
LINK provides people taking part in medical studies an easy way to track themselves during the study. LINK then feeds this good quality data to the researchers and prompts better research.
Traditionally the involvement of patients in pharmaceutical research is limited to their participation in studies. While the patient is the key to run the studies, most of the data is gathered by the doctor. With the emerging trend of quantifying one’s personal life, the usual study process could be completely redesigned by increasing the involvement of patients and letting them collect their data by themselves or even automatized.
LINK is leveraging this idea. With the use of a smartphone application and selftracking gadgets the user is provided with new ways to easily track relevant data for studies. Thereby participation in studies becomes more convenient for the patient while increasing the quality and availability of data for the researcher. That is especially the case for data captured by the tracking devices, such as activity or sleep, as these mostly remove the bias usually resulting when patients track the values themselves.
By providing a new data source that is directly fed by patients and collects the relevant data needed to prove the drugs superiority towards the payer, we envision to enhance the RLE process. Furthermore, our team embraces the chance to make a meaningful change in the everyday lives of pharmaceutical companies, researchers and the all of us people by bringing medical research and patients closer together.