Healthcare providers across the U.S. are investing billions in local outpatient centers and microhospitals. Sutter Health, AdventHealth, and Ardent Health alone plan to spend more than $1 billion building new facilities that deliver care to dispersed geographic locations at a lower cost and with a smaller footprint than traditional hospitals or medical practices.
This shift provides patients with easier access to care near where they live and work. But as patients embrace these new options and receive care across multiple locations, their health data becomes increasingly dispersed across systems and providers. With records spread across multiple, unconnected platforms, blind spots in a patient’s records can complicate coordinated care delivery.
Fragmentation also impacts clinical research, compounding existing challenges in non-interventional research around capturing comprehensive, meaningful data. The need for models that can access complete patient data across all care settings is intensifying.
Current, gold-standard methodologies fall short
Non-interventional research needs have grown increasingly complex, and current approaches are inadequate. Many research organizations capture only fragments of patients’ complete journeys, limiting their ability to follow patients longitudinally and comprehensively assess key outcomes.
While traditional site-based studies can collect some of the patient journey, including retrospective and prospective data, and can meet the data needs of simple research questions, they are expensive, laborious, and place a high burden on participants. For studies that require more complete endpoint ascertainment, these single networks are limited and likely to miss critical data.
Patients commonly see multiple providers annually, including primary care physicians and specialties, particularly if the patient has a chronic or complex condition. Patients also change providers regularly – a recent Accenture survey of 10,000 U.S. consumers found that about 30% changed providers within a single year.
This fragmentation creates significant blind spots in research, with implications extending beyond simple data collection challenges. When researchers miss key events like adverse reactions recorded at urgent care centers, medication adjustments made during telehealth visits, or outcomes documented at facilities outside their study network, they risk drawing incomplete or misleading conclusions. The risk is particularly high in long-term studies tracking chronic conditions, where patients’ care journeys span years and multiple care settings. The result is research that may not reflect the full complexity of the real world, potentially limiting the applicability of findings.
AI-powered data collection for informed research
Tech-enabled, AI-powered approaches to non-interventional research are breaking down data silos. With a patient’s consent, these methods can access a complete, 360-degree view of a patient’s journey across all care sites and locations, retrospectively and prospectively. They retrieve data from electronic health records, physician notes, lab results, and claims data from any care location, including the growing network of outpatient facilities and microhospitals that traditional methods may miss.
This comprehensive data access enables AI to surface relevant endpoints wherever they occur, for human review and verification. The result is rapid, high-quality real-world insights with minimal bias, captured from the full care spectrum.
Enhanced patient experience and engagement
These methods also transform the participant experience, an important consideration as patients increasingly seek and expect healthcare to be convenient. With remote technology, participating in a study is no longer constrained by site accessibility, extending access and driving patient representativeness. With much of their data accessed passively through existing medical records, patients face reduced burden while researchers gain longitudinal data and minimize loss to follow-up. This is especially critical when dropout rates can exceed 50% in long-term site-based studies.
Remote participation also enables direct patient engagement and the seamless integration of patient-generated data into research outcomes. Patient-reported outcomes and surveys can be collected at regular intervals without requiring site visits, while wearable devices enable continuous real-world data collection that captures the patient experience between clinical encounters.
Maintaining scientific rigor
Moving research beyond traditional models offers clear advantages, but tech-enabled, remote study designs must still meet rigorous scientific, ethical, and regulatory standards. Leading remote platforms address this by utilizing experienced principal investigators to oversee participation and ensure high-quality data collection, maintaining the same scientific rigor as site-based studies while expanding their reach and comprehensiveness.
Transforming research with patient-centered approaches
The shift to outpatient sites and microhospitals delivers the convenient, accessible care patients demand. But this evolution requires research methodologies to evolve as well. The future of meaningful healthcare research depends on our ability to capture complete patient journeys across all care settings. Researchers must now choose study designs capable of doing so.
Those who lead the transition will gain competitive advantages in treatment development, regulatory submissions, and patient outcomes. Those who continue to utilize traditional methods will find themselves increasingly affected by fragmented insights. The question is not whether this transformation will happen, but which organizations will lead it.
Photo: marchmeena29, Getty Images
Rachael Thomas Higgins is a seasoned executive with a proven track record in commercial development, strategic growth, and clinical research innovation. She currently serves as Chief Commercial Officer at PicnicHealth, where she leads the company’s commercial strategy and market expansion efforts. Prior to joining PicnicHealth, Rachael was Vice President of Business Development at CorEvitas, LLC, where she drove strategic partnerships and revenue growth across the real-world evidence landscape. With a deep understanding of the life sciences ecosystem, Rachael brings a forward-thinking approach to accelerating innovation in healthcare and research.
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