Solving for the Digital Divide to Increase Patient Participation in Clinical Trials

Tina Aswani-Omprakash is a Crohn’s patient and award-winning patient leader and health advocate based out of New York City. She has had Crohn’s Disease for 16 years and has had numerous surgeries. Ms Aswani-Omprakash maintains a blog and advocacy platform called Own Your Crohn’s (http://ownyourcrohns.com) and recently co-founded IBDesis, a community for South Asians living with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). She has now merged IBDesis into a patient-clinician non-profit initiative called South Asian IBD Alliance (SAIA). Her overarching aim is to normalize the rhetoric around chronic illnesses and disabilities in order to help diverse groups of patients own their ailments to live fuller, happier lives.Via her writing, lobbying, social media advocacy and speaking engagements, she spearheads public health causes, including those proposing research for and creating awareness for IBD, life-saving ostomy surgery, gastroparesis, fistulizing disease and initiatives supporting health equity for women and racial, ethnic & sexual minorities.Ms Aswani-Omprakash is pursuing her Master’s degree in Public Health at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. Additionally, she has spoken at many premier GI conferences worldwide and has co-authored four research papers and two guidebooks on IBD care. Ms Aswani-Omprakash does freelance work as a patient advisor for non-profits as well as ostomy manufacturers, in addition to pharmaceutical and digital health companies. Her aim is to help companies recognize disparities and unmet needs in minority health populations.The Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation recognized Ms Aswani-Omprakash in 2021 for her phenomenal leadership and powerful impact on the IBD community with the Above & Beyond Volunteer Award. Ms Aswani-Omprakash’s blog was also recognized as a 2020 Best Blog by Healthline and she was awarded the 2019 Healio Gastroenterology Disruptive Innovator Award by the American College of Gastroenterology for moving the needle on GI care for patients.

Over her 16-year nurse practitioner career, MarieElena Cordisco, MA, APRN, NP-C, has been active in clinical care and research. She holds a Master of Arts in Professorial Nursing, Post Graduate Certificate Nurse Practitioner and Certificate of Graduate Study in Public Health. She is an experienced family nurse practitioner with specialty in diabetes and endocrinology. Ms Cordisco has been directing the Office of Clinical Trials at Nuvance Health for the past 7 years. In October 2019, she was appointed Associate Vice President for Clinical Trials. Ms Cordisco leads a team of professionals managing clinical trials in all therapeutic areas for seven hospitals and two large medical subspeciality offices located in western Connecticut and the Hudson valley of New York. Nuvance Health, a community-based hospital network offers clinical trials in every therapeutic area.For the past two years she has served on the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative and is a member of the work group for embedded trials. She has been a member of the leadership council for the Society of Clinical Research Sites since 2018. Ms Cordisco has spoken on topics which include FDA audits, communication in clinical research, incorporating site input into protocol development and the importance of data for site management. As a research leader, Ms Cordisco has special interest in increasing nurse practitioner led clinical trials.  Ms Cordisco holds publications in clinical care, clinical research and serves as a peer reviewer for the Journal of Nurse Practitioner and Diabetes Care.

Adama Ibrahim is a UK top 100 influential tech leader passionate about diversity and inclusion practices. She is an innovation award winning pharma industry advisory consultant, founder, disruptor, strategy expert, blockchain advocate, technology enabled clinical trials and patient engagement thought leader with over 20 years in the NHS on commission by the DOH and in Industry. Ms Ibrahim has a deep experience of R&D transformation and led strategies and implementation of decentralized digital clinical trials and regulated digital platforms. She is a driver for change through identifying unmet customer needs, digital strategies, implementation and expansion of disruptive digital platform technologies across drug development and commercial lifecycles and customer journeys.

Timothy Joy is the Head, Clinical Operations Strategic Solutions at Pfizer. Mr Joy is responsible for leading a global team tasked to identify and develop creative, scalable, technical and process related solutions for unmet global clinical trial needs.Mr Joy has been at Pfizer since 2001, when he joined Development Informatics. In Development Informatics he was responsible for implementation and support of Pfizer Electronic Data Capture systems. Since joining Global Product Development in 2006 Mr Joy has held multiple positions with increasing responsibility. He represented Pfizer on an Industry council to redesign and implement enhanced versions of Electronic Data Capture, implement clinical and operational data warehouse, and most recently developing Pfizer’s Decentralized Clinical Trial strategy.Mr Joy has been involved in numerous innovative projects and initiatives to redesign Investigator Site Support, implementation and usage of novel Patient Technologies, and creation of Pfizer’s eSource strategy.

Ash Rishi is founder and CEO of COUCH Health, a global creative health engagement agency that serves to make health research inclusive. Its focus covers a range of solutions, including patient insights and engagement through to recruitment and retention within health research. Mr Rishi has over 15 years of experience in the industry, navigating the diverse needs of big pharma through to smaller biotech companies. With experience that covers the full medicine lifecycle, from pre-clinical to lifecycle management, his passions lay in working to make research more inclusive and has founded Demand Diversity a non-profit in 2023.

Joan Severson leads the advanced technologies and digital biomarkers team at Clinical ink. She has more than 20 years of experience in computer science and human computer interaction, most recently as co-founder, president, and general manager for Digital Artefacts, which was acquired by Clinical ink in 2021. She collaborated to create BrainBaseline™, an unrivaled end-to-end digital health platform to conduct decentralized clinical trials that allows for complex cognitive, voice, and mobility data capture. Over the course of her career, she has built a team of designers and developers — integrating computer science, engineering, human factors, human computer interaction, medicine, GIS, data analysis, and design — to provide solutions to pharmaceutical, government, and leading institutions. At Clinical ink, she brings scientific and human-computer interaction expertise to inform the monitoring of cognitive performance, behavior, movement, and real-world activity across many complex therapeutic areas, both inside and outside the clinic. She earned a BA and MS in computer science and engineering from the University of Iowa.