Demos
John Snow Labs is proud to announce its participation as an industry partner in UNIFIED (Unifying Framework for Patient-Centred Clinical-study Endpoints Derived from Digital Health Technologies) — a groundbreaking five-year, €27 million global initiative funded by the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) under the Horizon Europe program.
The project aims to develop a harmonised, internationally aligned approach, integrating patient-centred clinical-study endpoints to support the full benefit of a therapy to patients. Led by Erasmus University Rotterdam and Pfizer, UNIFIED brings together 40 leading organizations from academia, healthcare, patient advocacy, and industry to put patient voices at the heart of healthcare decision-making.
Clinical trial outcomes used to guide regulatory and health technology assessments often fail to represent what truly matters to patients. UNIFIED seeks to close this gap by project by building an evidence-based framework and consensus-based recommendations, providing structured guidelines, protocols, and standards to integrate patient preference information (PPI), clinical outcome assessments (COAs), and digital health technology (DHT)-derived measures into healthcare decisions. It will also determine the minimal (clinically) important difference in a clinical-study endpoint, based on what is meaningful to patients.
By combining these types of patient-centred data, UNIFIED offers a robust view of the full benefits of a health intervention through a patient-focused lens. UNIFIED will achieve this through a mix of tech advances, like AI, policy support, cultural shifts in healthcare, and different types of patient-centred information, such as patient preferences, patient-reported outcomes, and digital health measures.
“We see this as a breakthrough project. By combining the expertise of public and private institutions, we hope to close the gap that patients, clinicians, industry, academics, and policymakers have long faced. It’s ambitious, it’s necessary, and it directly addresses what patients have been seeking,” Prof. Dr. Esther de Bekker-Grob, UNIFIED Project Public Lead & Professor of Health Economics & Health Preferences, Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Advancing Applied AI for Patient-Centered Research
John Snow Labs will lead the project’s applied AI for language, bringing healthcare-trained LLMs and curated biomedical data assets to help unify patient PPI, COAs, and DHT measures. With its production-grade medical NLP models and expert-curated datasets, the company will supply fit-for-purpose components to extract, link, and standardize patient-centered information across studies and settings.
John Snow Labs CTO Dr. Veysel Kocaman will serve as a scientific lead and a member of the AI Review board, ensuring state-of-the-art methods are deployed responsibly and are aligned with the UNIFIED governance framework. The company will co-lead the creation of rigorous evaluation benchmarks for accuracy, safety, fairness, and robustness that partners will use to test and compare AI methods. JSL will also contribute to defining the project’s data and software architecture so that foundation model-based approaches are interoperable, auditable, and reusable across disease areas and sites.
As an IHI contributing partner, JSL is investing both expertise and in-kind technology to accelerate delivery, including scalable analytics infrastructure based on Apache Spark for high-volume, privacy-preserving processing of multimodal patient-centred data. In addition, JSL will provide a bundled software licensing program for academic collaborators across UNIFIED, giving researchers access to its healthcare NLP libraries and tools, together with hands-on training and implementation support.
These contributions are jointly delivered with academic and industry partners to ensure results are scientifically sound and ready for adoption.
A Look into the Future of Patient-Driven Healthcare
Today, healthcare decisions are driven mainly by clinically objective measures such as disease or symptom severity and clinical progression. In five years, with the UNIFIED Framework in place, decision-making will be guided by novel measures that capture a more comprehensive range of patient-centred benefits.
- For patients, this means treatments aligned with their needs and values are more likely to be developed, approved, and reimbursed.
- For clinicians and health systems, it will provide a more holistic view of how treatments impact what matters to patients.
- For industry, UNIFIED will provide a clearer path to using patient-centred endpoints in clinical studies.
- For policymakers, it will facilitate more targeted resource allocation toward solutions that best meet patients’ needs.
For more details about UNIFIED and participating partners, see a full press release here.
