Jennifer Goldsack on Incentivizing Digital Innovation

Welcome to the Clinical Minds “Innovator Insights Corner,” where we’ll be sharing fascinating stories, perspectives, and predictions from the guests of ‘from Dreamers to Disruptors’, a podcast by Medidata exploring life sciences innovation and the visionaries behind it all

Jennifer Goldsack’s role as the founder and CEO of the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) gives her a unique perspective on the progress of digital adoption across the healthcare sector. As a former Olympic rower, she has channeled the drive that made her a top athlete into the pursuit of creating a fairer, more effective system for patients—drawing on cutting-edge technologies to change how we develop treatments and deliver care.

Jennifer shared her fascinating perspective on the evolution of digital innovation in healthcare, why clinical trials have started to fall behind, and how we can get our industry back on track.

DiMe’s Changing Mission in an Evolving Healthcare Landscape

DiMe was founded in 2019. But even in this short period of time, Jennifer has seen its mission grow and change significantly. What began as an organization designed to support visionary leaders in promoting digital transformation has—in an era of rapid change for the healthcare sector—expanded its focus to grapple with these sweeping changes.

Jennifer says that, at the outset, DiMe’s focus was “a small but mighty cadre of innovators across medical product development and healthcare delivery who were thinking differently about the new digital tools in the toolbox, and how they could be deployed to fundamentally reimagine the way we develop new medical products and care for people.” DiMe was set up to support those individuals and organizations that were at the forefront of digital adoption and transformation.

That mission has shifted over the past six years, driven by a huge transformation in healthcare’s relationship to digital technologies—a change that underlines the importance of DiMe’s work.

“It's [no longer] about helping this small but mighty cadre of leaders who are thinking differently,” says Jennifer. “It's actually about healthcare and the digital era. This is not an edge case anymore. We can see that our colleagues in the federal government—ASTP, ONC, CMS, FDA—are being very clear about their ambition around digital. We can think about the proliferation of virtual care, decentralized trials, the use of a variety of different tools in both health and wellness, and in healthcare delivery. This is about healthcare in the digital era. As we sit here in 2025, it's not a small faction of the industry who are doing interesting things on the side.”

In this era of digital innovation across the healthcare industry, Jennifer identifies one particular area that has struggled to keep up: clinical trials.

Promoting Innovation in Clinical Research

“When we founded DiMe in the spring of 2019, we were much more active in the clinical trial space,” says Jennifer. “There was real appetite and interest in digital endpoints and the development of remote sensing technologies that could be deployed to capture data and information outside the trial site.” COVID-19 demonstrated the industry’s ability to move fast when there was no other option, but Jennifer and Anthony agree that this pace has decelerated compared to other sectors in healthcare.

“We saw a real willingness to do things differently during COVID. Then we saw a regression. Now maybe we're seeing another mini wave move through the clinical trials industry, with a willingness around the use of new types of AI technology.”

– Anthony Costello

Jennifer sees this as the result of the current economic environment, which disincentivizes risk taking and encourages decision makers to stick to old tools and practices rather than trying new things that might not be a success. “I think the challenge that we have is that we don't have the right incentive structures in place to encourage investment and the embracing of new methodologies and tools that we need in order to continue to have a commercially viable industry,” she says.

For a better understanding of the risks and potential rewards of innovation, Jennifer suggests a “value based innovation framework” that takes a deeper look into short-term achievements beyond immediate ROI. “I implore our colleagues in clinical trials to recognize the risk of not embracing innovation,” she says. “I would ask executives to think about how they message and incentivize that. And I would ask for anyone with decision-making or budget responsibility to have the courage to innovate on behalf of the patients that our entire industry exists to serve.”

Harnessing the Power of Clinical Data

For Jennifer, the way that the industry makes use of clinical trial data is a key opportunity for innovation and change. By making better use of data, we can deliver more accurate results faster and reduce the burden on patients who may be suffering from debilitating illnesses that limit where and how they interact with a trial.

“We have to think about our ability to reconcile data from different sites,” she says. “We have to consider our ability to use every single part of the tech stack to do things like virtual visits.” By making better use of existing health records and results from other studies, we can access valuable information rather than insisting that it be reproduced by repeating time-consuming tests on patients.

“The fundamental, fiat currency in the digital era is data.”

– Jennifer Goldsack

Many useful tools already exist, but are not being taken full advantage of, such as synthetic control arms, which allow studies to use statistical methods to create virtual control groups. This is particularly useful when studying terminal cancers or rare diseases that limit the number of patients it’s possible to enroll.

“The FDA has accepted synthetic control arms for the best part of 30 years,” says Jennifer. “In the US, in Europe, in Asia, we have relied on synthetic control arms for a long time. There is very low regulatory risk associated with this and, as a patient, don't put me into a randomized control trial if there is a possibility to model the control arm.”

Clinical trials have many amazing tools to work with. It’s our responsibility to make the most of them to create better outcomes for patients.

Listen to Jennifer Goldsack and Anthony Costello’s full conversation in from Dreamers to Disruptors Episode 7 to discover more about DiMe’s mission to accelerate digitization, and how our industry can work with them to develop the life-saving tools that patients need.