Ten years ago, Greg Simon, who was the Head of Policy at Pfizer at the time and served as President of the Biden Cancer Initiative, asked our DPharm audience: when was the last time you thanked your patients for being in a clinical trial? No one raised their hand. My immediate thought was that there was an urgent need for a conference on customer service for patients in clinical trials.

We began to research the topic within the pharmaceutical industry and received enlightening feedback: we can’t look at patients as customers, we can’t directly communicate with patients, there are privacy laws, we don’t directly work with patients, and more. We learned that often people who have direct contact with patients are not necessarily trained to work with patients to empathize with their condition and lifestyle.

What To Do?
We knew that something drastically had to change and a paradigm shift in how the industry views and works with patients was paramount. We also realized that as researchers, we needed to start with ourselves. We needed to make that paradigm shift in who and how we do our research. With that, six years ago, for the first time we began to research directly with patients. Getting their feedback changed the way we produce our conferences and, more importantly, how we can affect positive change for patients through our conferences.

What Patient Research Taught Us
Patients taught us empathy with their disease, but also with their lifestyle and their struggles in finding and experiencing a clinical trial. In particular, we learned the vital need to:

Understand and incorporate the patient’s voice in designing clinical trials and developing a clinical endpoint
Vastly improve the patient’s entire experience in a clinical trial
The result was the first conference in how to truly view patients as partners. The 8th Annual Patients as Partners conference in August 2023 and are now delighted to present the 6th Annual Patients as Partners Europe conference May 20-21, 2024. If you have any questions, please contact us at service@tcfllc.org.

Best wishes,

​​​​​​​Valerie Bowling
Executive Director
The Conference Forum

Allyson Adams
Marketing Manager
Patients as Partners Europe



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