A recent Grand Rounds webinar presented by C. Michael Gibson, MS, MD, described how open access, patient empowerment, social media, and digital health are transforming clinical trials. Dr. Gibson is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and president and CEO of Baim and PERFUSE Research Institutes.

Among the key points:

• The COVID-19 pandemic has been a call to arms to physicians to combat not only the virus but the misinformation.
• As the internet is replacing the printing press, “copyleft” is replacing copyright in this new open-access era. It is a participatory community with bidirectional flow of information through social media.
• Health data does not equal health care. Patients are looking to physicians to curate health information.
• In this new world of clinical research, patients are enrolling in virtual trials via a phone app and will be followed up online through claims data and patient-reported outcomes.
• Patient-empowered trials have the potential to provide more generalizable study results and to lead to patient-specific predictions through use of artificial intelligence.

Watch the complete webinar and download the slides.

Read more in The Democratization of Medical Research and Education Through Social Media: The Potential and the Peril (Gibson, JAMA Cardiology, 2017) and learn about the Heartline Study as an example of a “giga trial.”