PatienTrials
Putting Patients First in Clinical Trials

Watching his teenage kids spend most of their time on instant messaging (IM), Ravi Malireddy, a concerned father, founded a company to block chats in a bid to improve the millennial social lives. However, he soon realized the rise of IM as a viable mode of communication, and the plethora of implementations and business opportunities it can bring to the pharmaceutical industry. Leveraging this trend in combination with his decades of expertise in successfully building products, an ExWorkday technologist-turned-investor and Booth alumnus laid the foundation for—PatienTrials—the first company to bring in clinical trials on to a HIPAA-compliant IM platform. Harnessing core business values from the founders of Workday, PatienTrials takes a patient-first approach to improve patient adherence and retention in clinical trials that result in shorter study timelines, reducing overall drug development costs.

Focusing on Phase 3 of clinical trials, PatienTrials creates an online community between patient, doctors, nurses, and principal investigator (PI) involved in a clinical trial, which also allows management of multiple studies, site structure, resources and compliance from a single platform. “Built around IM, the PatienTrials solution empowers patients with full access to patient and treatment data, and promotes self-care initiatives,” says Ravi Malireddy, CEO and Founder of PatienTrials. Unlike traditional clinical trials, the company utilizes a combination of bots, AI technology, and IoT devices to minimize patient in person visits to the clinical trial’s site thus reducing patient burden. Although PatienTrials’ offering remains patient-centric, it also empowers sites to manage/automate multiple clinical studies from within a single platform eliminating the back office manual paperwork.

When a patient chosen/invited to participate in a clinical trial, PatienTrials takes them through an automated pre-questionnaire on mobile or desktop onboarding process that is followed by a video chat/offline conversation with the PI. The user is then taken through an informed eConsent process, which comprises setup of educational videos, keeps track of all the watched videos, and presents questions to ensure patient understanding of the study protocol. PatienTrials supports audio and video consent for countries with regulatory requirements/low literacy rate where patients can record and upload their consent in their local language.

Built around instant messaging, the PatienTrials solution empowers patients with full access to patient and treatment data, and promotes self-care initiatives

Once enrolled, patients get access to the community and their treatment information. Based on patient questions, PatienTrials supported by NLP (Natural Language Processing enabled in 51 languages) can detect an adverse event and process it based on its severity, can guide the treatment or escalate/notify the relevant care provider. The platform supports AI-monitoring with configurable threshold (1 percent or higher) on the adverse events across the community before elevating it to the pharmacovigilance systems.

PatienTrials’ AI-powered agent engages patients with pre-scheduled survey questions, medication and appointment reminders through text messages and provides options/ability for the patients to respond to the message capturing timely crucial data. Catering to patients with mobility challenges, PatienTrials offers in-app cab-booking services from Uber and Lyft that helps caregivers and the sites to remotely schedule/ad-hoc requests to the visits. PatienTrials offers an easy to manage re-consent process feature with broadcast message on the platform to meet local regulatory requirements. PatienTrials integrates study system and EMR system (FHIR) to provide patients and doctors with unified access to patient journey map between visits.

As a part of service expansion, PatienTrials is harnessing insights from its collected data to drive predictive analytics and deliver adverse-event detection. The company also plans to launch soon AI-enabled pill detection feature, which will allow patients to point their mobile device at a pill, and get information regarding its consumption and side effects pertaining to their present medical condition. PatienTrials also plans to rollout friendly bracelet wearables with no charging required for patient vitals monitoring (24x7) especially in developing countries with high number of clinical trials. “The platform is being built to natively support IoT-powered wearables and gadgets such as Fitbit, Apple Watch, Alexa, and Google Home, and bringing patients back to the center of care delivery in clinical trials” Malireddy concludes. As a member of well-reputed MATTER community of top healthcare innovators in Chicago, PatienTrials with enviable team and advisory board is all set for success!