| Thanks! Digital health can be incredibly fun and rewarding, but there are plenty of opportunities to run head first into walls you may not have realized even existed. Aside from the ethics considerations, privacy regulations (and the desire to tread conservatively) can lead to some odd implementation decisions...especially if you're coming into the industry from a general or consumer oriented tech background. I once worked on a medication adherence project for patients in Italy where patients needed to complete bi-weekly assessments and generally track their medication adherence. We set up a secure portal/website for patients, but were prohibited from emailing them reminders when their next assessment was due. The sponsor (aka pharma co) was extremely conservative re: patient privacy laws and more or less left it at, "well, the patient will just have to remember to return to the website, log in, and complete their survey at the appointed time." After a couple of months of sub-optimal survey completion rates, they re-evaluated their position and let us send out survey reminder emails.....which is a baseline thing to do when you need to retain participants over the life of a study. Oddly enough, this was for a commercial project (medication was available on the market, physicians were referring their patients to this website as a value added sort of service) and the commercial side is a bit more wild west than phase 2/3 research. Well, as wild west as the pharma/clinical research industry gets :) There are parallels between customer acquisition/retention in SaaS and patient recruitment/retention in clinical trials that are pretty interesting...but I think most folks on the Saas side would think the healthcare folks are trying to solve problems with one (if not two) hands tied behind their backs - and in some cases, wouldn't be wrong in thinking so. |