uMotif 'off to the races' with patient first platform after announcing partnership with Syneos Health

The uMotif cloud-native and highly configurable platform has been designed collaboratively with patients, healthcare professionals, monitors, data managers and sponsors. It is a modern platform that can be quickly adapted to meet protocol specific requirements, providing the best flexibility for sponsors, sites and patients.

Catching up with Rosenberg at this year’s DIA Global in Boston, OSP spoke to him about what it was that made uMotif stand out from the crowd.

Rosenberg was asked to join the leadership team and says when he was approached by the company, uMotif thought it was further along with the development of the platform, but he found it wasn’t. However, he saw the potential and decided to join the board.

He said: “I came out of retirement for this, I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t believe in what the company was doing – believe me, I was getting used to playing golf and drinking cognac!”

He felt the team needed to do a lot more about the people aspect which the company has acted on, putting the analytics in for pharma and making sure the patients always had a great experience.

He said: “We achieved all that and then we've been going crazy commercially ever since and then we signed a big deal with Syneos Health.”

The deal with the biopharmaceutical solutions organization was officially announced on Monday (June 26)

In addition to uMotif providing eCOA and ePRO services for Syneos’ customers, the companies will develop and deploy an exclusive patient-centric platform to deliver solutions including patient identification, recruitment, eConsent, eDiary, patient engagement and retention, and payments.

Syenos said that complemented by its StudyKIK recruitment technology platform, it will build a single application to help drive better engagement, compliance, and retention with patients, and reduce site burden.

Micheal Brooks, chief operating officer at Syneos Health, said: “The partnership with uMotif is a natural fit as both companies share a forward-thinking approach to technology and are committed to the site and patient experience.

“We’re excited to collaborate with uMotif to deliver an integrated, best-in-class, patient-facing solution to bring clinical trials closer to the patient.”

Rosenberg said he truly believes uMotif are standout different and that is why people are sitting up and starting to take notice. 

“We take a slightly different approach to our eClinical platform, we will give the patients the schedule but then we also we flip it around. We ask what is that this patient needs to be a willing, active and compliant participant – and importantly we say thank you, he said.

“Think about it, no-one says thank you, we have this really great user interface so can we ask how the trial is going for them and check they are getting the information they need, we can ask them whether they feel valued, whether they are going to benefit and how it is impacting their life.”

Rosenberg continued: “This is pretty remarkable at a small company with 85 people becoming the preferred partner of a $5 billion CRO.

“That to me, that was a seminal event of credibility right away, you know. I guess people should pay attention - we're off to the races now. You know, suddenly people are recognising us, seeing us kicking innovation and seeing that we're different.

“The pharma industry used to call patients subjects up until about five years ago – they call mice subjects. They still don't treat the patients like the heroes that they are. And I think being a participant in a clinical trial is somewhat equivalent to joining the army. I mean you're conducting a service absolutely. You're giving your body and your time and that’s hard.”

Rosenberg worked for Oracle before he retired (the first time) where he would openly speak about the treatment of patients in clinical trials.

“I would scold pharma for not treating them properly and that is the motivation for the work uMotif do and will continue to do within this partnership and others.”

Syneos Health says the partnership represents continued investment in technology and data solutions that accelerate clinical development, integrating the voice of the site and patient to optimize performance for biopharma customers.