uMotif: Patient-Centricity Took Flight Again in 2025

As featured in Discover Pharma.

We asked CEO Steve Rosenberg, to reflect on how clinical trials are placing patients at the center of every decision. 

In 2025, patient-centricity moved to the forefront like never before, and for good reason: With protocols becoming more complex and specialized trials targeting smaller populations, each patient is more valuable than ever. In turn, there’s been a huge emphasis on more patient-centric and effective recruitment, screening, consenting, and retention.

In this environment, we’ve also witnessed an expanded focus on the patient-site relationship. I’ve always considered this to be the most important relationship in a clinical trial.

Sites are primarily responsible for recruitment, consenting, and enrolling patients to get the trials started, and a strong patient-site relationship is a critical factor in engagement, compliance, and retention. I’d wager that most people in a clinical trial don’t know who the sponsor is, but they know the person who’s guiding them through the trial – and that relationship keeps the patient a willing participant.

Sites also are increasingly burdened by more and more technology, which actually makes their jobs exponentially more difficult. The industry is looking for and adopting tools that can help to strengthen the patient-site relationship without adding new levels of complexity.

Reflecting these realities and priorities, in 2025 we saw wider adoption of consent management solutions, including eConsent. Patients having a solid understanding of what they are signing up for is more important, and the consent process is front and center to that. It’s also the consenting process that tends to set the tone for the patient journey throughout the trial.

Sponsors and regulators also are placing greater emphasis on patient-reported experiences and outcomes, and they’re playing an expanded role in the approval process. To effectively capture this critical data, clinical trial technology can’t just be functional. It must incorporate – from inception – a patient-mindset design that works to eliminate barriers and bridges science, patients, and progress.

We also cannot recap 2025 without discussing AI and how the industry is embracing AI-powered technology to deliver meaningful improvements to clinical research. Our industry is using AI to speed up documentation and configuration specifications, improve data quality, and enable new insights. And it’s still early days. At uMotif, we’re applying AI to make us more efficient, more consistent, and to deliver the highest quality for our customers. We operate in a highly regulated industry in which patient safety is paramount, and we’re ensuring that when we build and deploy AI assistants, a human has the last say and is responsible for the trial’s integrity.