Matthew Gordon on Real-World Evidence at Parexel

What is Real-World Evidence?

Real-World Evidence (RWE) involves examining how medicines and treatments are approved globally and how they're utilized. Clinical trials test medicines to see if they're safe and effective. RWE checks if it's beneficial, safe, and if there's value to how you're treating patients.

Why is RWE important?

RWE plays a crucial role in healthcare decision-making for several reasons:

• It adopts a patient-centric approach, examining how treatments perform in real-life situations. This enables physicians to make better treatment decisions.
• It is essential for demonstrating the value of treatments across different markets, which is critical for ensuring patient access to medications.

How does RWE reflect real-world patient experiences?

RWE captures what happens when patients have stressful days, when they have three kids and a dog and they're running around. It looks at what happens when they miss a doctor's appointment, forget to take a medicine, or even worse, can't afford it and are making decisions on their own.

What does the future of RWE look like?

I see a promising future for RWE:

• It's about leveraging existing resources more effectively, specifically the data that already exists, and improving methodologies to use that data better.
• There's potential to look at patients more holistically, going beyond the current system where healthcare data is primarily used for billing purposes.
• AI and machine learning are beginning to play a role. They're being used to sort through massive amounts of data that we couldn't handle before. But we're just scratching the surface of their potential.

What advice would you give to someone considering a career in RWE at Parexel?

Embrace flexibility, embrace change, and be courageous. Speak your mind and push forward with your ideas. RWE is an area with lots of innovations, new vendors, and emerging technologies. It's about being able to make sense of these and say, 'I have an idea that I think can work.' Then, get the people around you charged up to see how we can improve what we do and do it better.

What's the most rewarding part of working in RWE?

The feeling of making a difference, both in my chosen career and most especially for patients. One of the first observational research projects I ever worked on was in a rare disease. It was at a time when the value of real-world data was starting to be recognized within the industry, as real-world effectiveness and safety were important topics in a post-approval setting. More than that, the program we developed provided clinicians and patients with critical insights into current treatments, which ultimately helped both make better treatment decisions.