The gap between the promise and practice of technology has been especially vivid in the area of pharmaceutical clinical trials, where even switching from paper to electronic data capture has proved too radical for some sponsors. Today’s guest, Kara Dennis, who is the managing director of digital health at Medidata, seeks to change all this to help the industry modernize.
Unlike many of our guests, Kara didn’t start out in medicine. She was a history major at Yale then joined Teach For America, which she says was the most difficult job of her life. Subsequently she worked at McKinsey where she was introduced to healthcare and attended business school at Harvard. In her present role leading digital health at Medidata, a forward-thinking clinical research organization based in New York, Kara is truly at the tip-of-the-spear and provides us with an up-to-date, down-to-earth view of how pharma companies are thinking about digital health in the context of clinical studies – and how this adoption might be accelerated.
This episode of Tech Tonics is sponsored by DNAnexus, the secure and compliant cloud platform that enables enterprise users to analyze, collaborate around, and integrate massive amounts of genetic and other health data.
