Industry spotlight

Findings
Successful deployment of digital clinical measures requires a shared foundation of standardized methodologies, terminology, and best practices.
The selection of digital measures must prioritize patient-centered outcomes and align with meaningful aspects of health.
Technology validation processes, including the Verification, Analytical Validation, and Clinical Validation (V3) framework, are crucial to ensuring data accuracy and reliability.
Interoperability, data security, and governance remain key challenges for digital health technologies in both research and clinical applications.
Case studies demonstrate the real-world utility of digital clinical measures in clinical research, patient care, and public health initiatives.

Recommendations
Stakeholders should follow a structured, stepwise approach to selecting and validating digital clinical measures, starting with identifying meaningful health aspects.
Digital health tools must undergo rigorous verification and validation to ensure they are fit-for-purpose and meet clinical and regulatory standards.
Patient engagement should be integrated into every stage of digital measure development to ensure the relevance and usability of selected endpoints.
Regulatory and payer engagement should occur early in the process to streamline market access and reimbursement pathways.
Organizations should adopt a proactive approach to data privacy, security, and governance, ensuring compliance with regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR.

Regulatory Considerations
The FDA and other regulatory bodies emphasize the need for clinical validation of digital measures before they can be used as primary endpoints in trials.
Standardization of digital health technologies is critical to regulatory approval, requiring alignment with frameworks such as HL7 and ISO standards.
Data security and privacy regulations must be strictly adhered to, particularly in decentralized clinical trials where remote monitoring is used.
Digital endpoint validation must include real-world evidence (RWE) to support regulatory decision-making and post-market surveillance.
Organizations must consider the evolving regulatory landscape for AI-driven health technologies, ensuring compliance with best practices for algorithmic transparency and bias mitigation.

Findings
Digital endpoints must not only support regulatory approval but also provide evidence that meets payer expectations for reimbursement and value-based care.
The lack of early engagement with payers and health technology assessment (HTA) agencies is a key barrier to the adoption of digital clinical measures.
Digital measures can enhance value-based care models by capturing patient-centered outcomes, reducing healthcare costs, and improving early disease detection.
The scalability and generalizability of digital endpoints remain challenges, particularly for diverse populations and real-world healthcare settings.
Technical and systematic barriers—such as data heterogeneity, stakeholder knowledge gaps, and inconsistent regulatory-payer alignment—are slowing the adoption of digital endpoint data for reimbursement decisions.

Recommendations
Pharma and medical product developers should engage early with payers and regulators to ensure digital endpoints align with reimbursement expectations.
Payers and HTA bodies should establish clear evidence thresholds for digital endpoint validation, ensuring consistency in market access decisions.
Digital endpoints should be validated against health-related quality of life (HRQoL) measures and patient-reported outcomes (PROs) to demonstrate clinical relevance.
Real-world evidence (RWE) should be incorporated into clinical trials alongside digital endpoints to strengthen reimbursement applications.
Stakeholders should prioritize scalable, patient-centered digital measures that capture disease progression over time and across different care settings.

Regulatory Considerations
Integrated Evidence Plans (IEPs) should be developed early to align digital endpoint evidence with regulatory and payer requirements.
Digital endpoints should be assessed through multi-stakeholder collaboration, ensuring validation across pharmaceutical, regulatory, and reimbursement frameworks.
Payers and regulators should work together to create aligned pathways for digital measure acceptance, reducing delays in market access.
Data security, privacy, and interoperability must be addressed to support regulatory approval and patient trust in digital health solutions.
The industry should leverage international regulatory-payer collaboration models, such as the HTA-EMA partnership and the FDA Payor Communication Task Force, to accelerate global digital endpoint adoption.

Findings
Meaningful outcome measures should align with patient priorities and clinical relevance, emphasizing aspects of health that impact daily life.
Digital tools must demonstrate value over traditional methods in capturing outcomes, especially in remote or decentralized contexts.
Questions about therapeutic benefit and endpoint sensitivity must address how these measures reflect patient improvements or disease progression.
Stakeholder collaboration is critical to selecting and validating concepts of interest and corresponding outcome measures.
Challenges include ensuring data privacy, operational feasibility, and addressing potential gaps in endpoint validation.

Recommendations
Engage patients and caregivers to identify meaningful aspects of health and concepts of interest relevant to their daily lives and goals.
Collaborate with clinicians to determine the clinical validity and utility of proposed measures and tools for endpoint development.
Ensure that DHTs selected for measurement add value beyond traditional methods and are feasible for clinical and real-world use.
Incorporate payer perspectives to align outcome measures with cost-benefit evaluations and reimbursement criteria.
Use the question bank as a flexible guide, adapting it to the specific needs and context of individual clinical trials.

Regulatory Considerations
Ensure endpoints and their measures meet regulatory standards for clinical relevance and sensitivity to therapeutic changes.
Align outcome measures with accepted core sets (e.g., COMET database) and validate them through stakeholder engagement.
Address concerns related to data privacy, scalability, and operational feasibility in the use of DHTs for endpoint development.
Plan for regulatory engagement to demonstrate the robustness of digitally-derived endpoints in pivotal clinical trials.
Provide evidence to support the incorporation of novel endpoints into regulatory and payer frameworks for decision-making.

Findings
Research is more impactful and relevant when patients and other stakeholders are treated as equal partners throughout the entire study lifecycle.
A lack of shared vision, clear communication protocols, and defined roles are significant barriers to the success of multi-stakeholder research teams.
Engaging diverse stakeholders leads to the development of more patient-centered research questions and outcome measures that reflect real-world priorities.
Institutional barriers, such as inflexible policies on compensation and data access for non-researcher team members, frequently undermine effective collaboration.
Successful patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) requires specific skills in collaborative problem-solving, conflict navigation, and leading productive team meetings.

Recommendations
Integrate patients, caregivers, clinicians, and other stakeholders into research teams from the initial planning stages to ensure alignment with patient needs.
Establish a shared vision and clear ground rules for communication, decision-making, and responsibilities to foster a cohesive and productive team environment.
Provide training and resources for all team members on best practices for stakeholder engagement, collaborative teamwork, and patient-centered research methods.
Institutions should develop supportive infrastructure, including fair compensation policies and streamlined onboarding processes, to facilitate meaningful stakeholder participation.
Research plans should be flexible, allowing teams to adapt their engagement strategies and methodologies in response to stakeholder feedback and changing circumstances.

Regulatory Considerations
Evidence generated through patient-centered outcomes research can strengthen regulatory submissions by demonstrating that a product’s benefits are meaningful to patients.
The inclusion of diverse patient populations in research, a core tenet of PCOR, helps generate real-world evidence that is more generalizable and relevant for post-market surveillance.
Regulatory bodies are increasingly emphasizing the use of patient-experience data and patient-reported outcomes, which are central to the PCORI research model.
Engaging stakeholders in the selection of clinical trial endpoints helps ensure alignment with patient priorities, which can facilitate more efficient regulatory review.
The collaborative, transparent methods promoted by PCORI can help build trust and align expectations among researchers, patients, and regulatory agencies.