In recent years, my work has increasingly integrated three domains: clinical medicine, digital health, and real-world evidence.
I am a rheumatologist, researcher, and Co-Founder and Medical Director of Midaia GmbH. My initial focus on digital support and longitudinal monitoring in inflammatory rheumatic diseases has expanded into developing a flexible digital infrastructure for conducting real-world evidence studies.
Why this matters
Traditional clinical studies provide structured snapshots of patients at predefined visits. However, many important patient experiences occur between these visits, including changes in pain and fatigue, physical activity, sleep, treatment adherence, mental well-being, lifestyle, and daily disease burden.
Digital research methodologies can facilitate the capture of this longitudinal dimension.
At Midaia, we are developing a flexible digital research platform designed to support real-world evidence studies. This platform enables configurable study workflows, longitudinal data collection, patient-reported outcomes, patient engagement, and decentralized or hybrid research approaches.
Our experience in rheumatology has offered a valuable environment for developing and testing these concepts. Working with longitudinal real-world data has revealed both opportunities and methodological challenges, such as missing data, sustained engagement, selection effects, interpretation of patient-generated information, and distinguishing statistical signals from clinically meaningful findings.
Expanding beyond disease-specific applications
A key insight has been that the underlying research infrastructure need not be restricted to a single disease or therapeutic area.
The underlying infrastructure can be adapted to diverse research questions and study designs, including selecting relevant outcomes, configuring patient journeys, collecting longitudinal data, integrating patient-reported and digital measures, and generating datasets suitable for real-world analyses.
Accordingly, we are developing Midaia from a disease-focused digital solution into a flexible platform for patient-centered real-world and digital clinical research.
Motivation for joining the Springer Nature Research Communities
I intend to use this platform to share results from our studies and to discuss broader methodological questions arising from digital and real-world research:
- How can meaningful longitudinal real-world evidence (RWE) studies be designed?
- Which digital outcomes are clinically meaningful and methodologically robust?
- Which factors determine sustained patient engagement in longitudinal digital studies?
- How should patient-generated data be interpreted alongside conventional clinical outcomes?
- In which contexts do decentralized and hybrid approaches meaningfully enhance research rather than merely introduce additional technology?
I am particularly interested in connecting with researchers, clinicians, pharmaceutical companies, contract research organizations (CROs), and other partners engaged in real-world evidence, digital health, patient-reported outcomes, decentralized research, and innovative models of longitudinal clinical studies.
I look forward to exchanging ideas, sharing our experiences to date, and exploring new collaborative opportunities.