We were thrilled to welcome Dr Abhi Pratap - Global Clinical Development Lead at Boehringer Ingelheim who delivered our October Seminar Series. In his talk “Why Mental Health Needs More Than New Drugs: Using Digital Health to Bring Patient-Centredness to Research and Care" , Abhi shared case examples from emerging clinical studies to show how digital health can bridge the gap between clinical research and patient care in mental health. We will explore digital health solutions that help quantify the real-world experiences of health that matter to people - bringing us closer to understanding what treatments work for whom, why, when, and for how long. Abstract: Innovation in mental health treatment has been strikingly limited compared to other fields of medicine. In the last 15 years, fewer than five truly novel psychiatric drugs have received regulatory approval. This stagnation reflects multifaceted challenges linked to heterogeneity of psychiatric disorders often lacking biological markers grounded in disease biology. Additionally, there is significant reliance on subjective clinician-, rater-, or patient-reported outcomes, which increases variability in trial outcomes and poses challenges in patient selection and endpoint determination. Clinical studies also encounter persistent obstacles, such as high dropout rates, poor generalizability, and endpoints that frequently do not reflect what patients and their families value most. Consequently, there is a critical gap in new treatment development that are patient-centered, enhancing quality of life in real-world settings. Use-case-centered implementation of digital health technologies offers a realistic path to address many of these barriers. Real-world data collected from smart devices can enable the continuous and ecologically valid capture of mood, cognition, behavior, and functioning, augmenting traditional, episodic assessments. This richer measurement framework can enhance sensitivity to change, reduce trial inefficiencies, and ground outcomes more directly in patients lived experience. In addition, the same smart devices can be used to deliver digital adaptations of psychosocial interventions, expanding access to evidence-based care and offering personalized and scalable options for populations that have been historically underserved due to stigma, geography, or cost. Dr. Abhi Pratap is the Global Clinical Development Lead at Boehringer Ingelheim, where he oversees clinical development programs for digital therapeutics aimed at addressing unmet needs in serious mental illnesses. Before joining Boehringer, he worked at Biogen, managing one of the largest decentralised studies on cognitive trajectories in real-world settings in collaboration with Apple. With over 15 years of experience in translational biomedical research, Dr. Pratap has led numerous health research studies that promote partnerships between academia and industry. His primary focus is on using digital health technologies to gain a deeper understanding of the real-life experiences of individuals with neurological and psychiatric disorders. His cross-sector research aims to accelerate patient-centered clinical development in central nervous system (CNS) disorders. Most recently, he led a successful pivotal Phase III trial targeting experiential negative symptoms of schizophrenia (NCT05838625) using a digital therapeutic. This study is among the first confirmatory trials to show improvement in negative symptoms to date. Additionally, Dr. Pratap serves as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Washington in Seattle and Boston University, and he is a visiting research fellow at King’s College London.

We're pleased to announce that DRIVE-Health PhD student, Dr Hugh Logan-Ellis - a Diabetes and Endocrinology Registrar at King's and ex-Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine at Dalhousie University - will deliver our September Seminar Series. In his talk “Extracting Clinical Value from EHR Data: Challenges, Pitfalls, and Practical Lessons" , In his talk, Hugh will share what clinicians have taught him about the reality of working with Electronic Health Record data and what they genuinely need from #AI tools, rather than what researchers might think they should want. Hugh has learned that making the most clinically useful tool could matter more than theoretical perfection. He'll discuss some principles he's gathered to help create AI solutions that fit seamlessly into clinical workflows, which he hopes might help others bridge the gap between academic research and genuine patient benefit. Using his PhD research on creating a single unit of health from #EHR data as a central example, Hugh will explore broader challenges: the messiness of real-world clinical data, the proliferation of unused risk scores, and why so many promising algorithms never make it past publication. These insights aim to help researchers develop tools that won't just die in papers, but have a real chance of improving clinical care. Seminar Series Event: " Extracting Clinical Value from EHR Data: Challenges, Pitfalls, and Practical Lessons" Date and Time: Thursday 25 September 2025, 12:00 – 13.00 hrs (BST) Location: The Judy Dunn Room, SGDP Building, Denmark Hill Campus, London, SE5 8AF Attendance: Mandatory for all DRIVE-Health students, therefore please accept the calendar invitation. Registration: Alumni and wider King's College London research community all welcome - please email drive-health-cdt@kcl.ac.uk to let us know if you would like to attend. Abstract: Picture the scene: It's Saturday morning, you're the senior resident doctor on call in a busy hospital, and you have a 40-page list of patients due for review. Half of your junior colleagues have called in sick, and you know you can't possibly see everyone. How do you decide who needs to be seen most urgently? The information to make these decisions is in the electronic health records, but accessing it quickly means opening each patient's chart individually. My PhD tries to tackle this problem: could we use an algorithm to compress scattered clinical data into a single, practical number? This question has led me on an interesting journey. I've spoken with clinicians from around the world about how they decide who is "sickest," discovering a surprising variety of terms for essentially the same idea and realising we might need more than one measure. My research has taken me to Canada to collaborate with Professor Kenneth Rockwood OC, whose groundbreaking work on frailty measurement has significantly shaped clinical practice worldwide. Working alongside him has given me valuable insights into why some academic ideas successfully transform patient care, while others remain confined to journals. As I explored increasingly sophisticated approaches to measure sickness, from simple laboratory-based indices to complex machine learning models, I stumbled across a key insight. Supervised machine learning can hindered by retrospective health data because when sick patients are successfully treated, they don’t have poor outcomes. This isn't just a quirky finding relevant to my PhD; it has broader implications for using a supervised paradigm on retrospective data whenever effective treatments are already in place. Bio Hugh is a resident medical doctor specialising in Internal Medicine and Diabetes and Endocrinology, working on his PhD at King's College London. His research focuses on measuring patient health status using electronic health records, drawing on his experience working across various healthcare settings in the UK and internationally.