Smart Start - Designing Powerful Clinical Trials Using Pilot Study Data.

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Digital health interventions may be optimized before evaluation in a randomized clinical trial. Although many digital health interventions are deployed in pilot studies, the data collected are rarely used to refine the intervention and the subsequent clinical trials. METHODS: We leverage natural variation in patients eligible for a digital health intervention in a remote patient-monitoring pilot study to design and compare interventions for a subsequent randomized clinical trial. RESULTS: Our approach leverages patient heterogeneity to identify an intervention with twice the estimated effect size of an unoptimized intervention. CONCLUSIONS: Optimizing an intervention and clinical trial based on pilot data may improve efficacy and increase the probability of success. (Funded by the National Institutes of Health and others; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT04336969.)