The PARADIGM project - Patients Active in Research and Dialogues for an Improved Generation of Medicines – carried out a mini campaign on social media between 2 and 20 March, using the hashtag #PARADIGM4Real. The aim of the campaign was to show the value and challenges of patient engagement and to draw attention to the PARADIGM tools that will enable better, more meaningful engagement.
The campaign consisted of a series of six articles, shared on Twitter via the project’s @imi_paradigm account. The first was an editorial piece and the other five articles were:
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On 5 March, The Children’s Tumor Foundation shared its learning in providing training to the patient community in order to enable more involvement within the medicines research and development (R&D) area.
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On 9 March, Novartis shared its experience in embedding patient engagement at all stages of the drug development process that was met within the company with both enthusiasm and scepticism.
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On 12 March, The Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health (CADTH) outlined its challenges and successes of integrating patient engagement processes across all programmes from the health technology assessment (HTA) standpoint, highlighting the importance of sharing and replicating good practices from other areas within the health system.
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On 16 March, Pfizer shared how a multi-stakeholder group was formed to plan and gather more patient insights for a clinical trial and how these insights ended up influencing the changes made in the trial protocol, hopefully making the trial more manageable for patients and carers.
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Finally, on 19 March, another patient engagement project was shared by the NIHR biomedical research centre of University College London Hospital where cancer patients played an instrumental role in the development of a digital health toolkit. The patients and carers’ roles evolved and expanded as the project progressed.
PARADIGM is an IMI-funded European project with a mission to provide a unique framework that enables structured, effective, meaningful, ethical, innovative, and sustainable patient engagement (PE) and demonstrates the “return on the engagement” for all players.
The PARADIGM project has received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 777450.