Individuals’ lives outside of the health care system significantly affect their ability to understand, prioritize, and act on medical recommendations. Satty Chandrashekhar Managing Director and Partner • Smarter clinical development will be a key focus • Applying data science to better understand social over the coming year. More than 20,000 new drug can- determinants of health (SDOH) will sustainably didates are currently under development. The statistical and equitably improve the health of at-risk pop- likelihood is that more than 30% of those entering Phase ulations. Individuals’ lives outside of the health care II will not progress and that approximately 60% of those system significantly affect their ability to understand, reaching Phase III will fail. Given that bringing a drug prioritize, and act on medical recommendations. As a to life takes around ten years and $2 billion, the case result, precision care interventions powered by SDOH— for improving the probability of success seems straight- such as housing, transportation, and food security—can forward. Meanwhile, a range of existing capabilities, significantly influence a person’s overall well-being. Most from machine learning of trial data to natural language important, data science can help clarify the health driv- processing of clinical notes, can create new efficiencies, ers among SDOH, suggest patient interventions for care although there is a critical supply gap in the talent workers to undertake, or recommend healthier behaviors needed to enable them at scale. In a number of areas for individuals to adopt. To make this actionable, provid- across the clinical life cycle, organizations can realize ers and health systems need access to extensive SDOH material benefits when these capabilities are present. data and capabilities. These include customized insights Key opportunities include improved trial speed, cost, and by population segment, human-centric intervention de- quality. Relevant areas include study strategy (selecting signs informed by behavioral science, and AI platforms appropriate countries and sites), protocol definition that channel interventions physically and digitally to the (choosing the best trial-design criteria and endpoints), right patients at the right time in the right ways— patient recruitment (finding and onboarding patients), learning and improving as they gather more data. and pharmacovigilance (understanding who might fail a screening and how a study is likely to perform).