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Kent Thoelke: Urgent Call to Action for True Clinical Trial Transformation

Kent Thoelke/LinkedIn

Jul 30, 2025, 10:04

Kent Thoelke: Urgent Call to Action for True Clinical Trial Transformation

Kent Thoelke, Chief Executive Officer/Founder of Paradigm Health, shared a post on LinkedIn:

“I was honored as the CEO/Founder of Paradigm Health to sit down with the editorial team at GlobalData to discuss the urgent call to action for true clinical trial transformation.

Many patients, especially those in rural and community settings that are outside major cities, lack access to clinical trials.

The reality is the industry, has for decades, generally run clinical trials primarily in Academic and Tertiary medical centers, when in reality the majority of patients recieve their patient care in the community and rural setting.

As a result of this model in the biopharma industry, the majority of patients lack access to a clinical trial as a care option. If, as an example you are a single parent in rural texas, with an hourly job and you get diagnosed with cancer, and the best care option for you is a clinical trial that is located in Dallas or Houston, the pracitcal barriers to participating in that trial are insurmountable.

Patients are then in the terrible position of having to choose between their jobs and families or the significant practical challenges required for them to participate in a clinical trial as a care option.

We need a systemic, new model, integrated in the care paradigm for clinical research as a care option, that can provide rural and community patients the same access to clinical trials with minimal barriers as those patients in larger cities.

For this to work however, we need a seismic shift in change management in the clinical trial industry to focus on selecting rural and community clinical trial sites as a norm and not an exception.”

Kent Thoelke