Medidata’s Patient Centricity by Design Initiative Earns Top Honors at 2021 SCOPE Participant Engagement Awards

March 3, 2021

Medidata, a Dassault Systèmes company, announces that the company’s Patient Centricity by Design (PCbD) initiative, led by Alicia C. Staley, Medidata’s senior director of Patient Engagement, was named a first-place winner at the 2021 SCOPE Participant Engagement Awards.

Medidata established its Patient Insights team to utilize the PCbD framework in all its efforts. It is a formal process that infuses the patient perspective into the software development life cycle to create technical solutions that improve the overall patient experience in clinical research interactions.

The SCOPE Participant Engagement Award embodies the values and personal accomplishments of Jerry Matczak, Clinical Open Innovations Community Manager at Eli Lilly, who passed away soon after receiving the inaugural Participant Engagement Award in 2017. Since then, the award has been dedicated to Matczak in the hopes that it will serve as a reminder of his ideals and accomplishments.

“I had the good fortune of meeting Jerry Matczak and we immediately connected, as he really understood and valued the patient perspective,” said Staley. “Jerry always encouraged me to work in this industry and focus on improving the patient experience—his influence and encouragement is part of what drives me in seeking out ways to improve the patient experience. I can only imagine what it would mean to Jerry to know that this award is given in his honor.”

Staley and her team built PCbD around three core principles of patient centricity: 

• Design: Develop and design products and solutions with the patient perspective at the forefront. This requires understanding the patient journey to empathize, the patient perspective to define, patient goals to ideate, patient expectations for prototypes, and patient outcomes for product testing.
• Engagement: Build consistent points of interaction for patients. Medidata hosts consistent events for patients to share their perspective at the beginning of the design process called Patient Design Studios. Each Medidata product is reviewed and approved by Patient Advocates as part of our Patient Design Studios. Patient Advocates are paid consultants who leverage their expertise in evaluation for key points of patient inclusion, resulting in superior products and improved patient experiences.
• Activation: Enable patients to be active participants in the clinical research process. Medidata established a Patient Design Advisory Board composed of patient advocates, caregivers, leadership team members, and product team members. This group provides governance oversight for the software development life cycle methodology of PCbD.

For more information, contact Paul Oestreicher, external communications director at poestreicher@medidata.com.