Agenda - Day 1
Patient Engagement Solutions & Innovations World Congress 2026 Europe
Transforming Care Through Technology, Empathy, and Collaboration.
London, United Kingdom
Day 1 - Thursday 26th March 2026
Robert Mitchell-Thain, Chief Executive Officer, PBC Foundation
SCALING PATIENT ENGAGEMENT FOR MEASURABLE IMPACT
- What frameworks successfully integrate engagement into R&D, commercial, and medical functions?
- How can organizations operationalize engagement as a strategic business capability?
- What governance models ensure consistency across markets and therapeutic areas?
- Which KPIs demonstrate success across enterprise-level engagement programs?
Moderator:
Clara Bentham, Head of Corporate Affairs UK and Ireland, Sanofi
Panellists:
Nikul Bakshi, Research Involvement Lead, Parkinson’s UK
Emma Sutcliffe, Founder, Chief Patient Officer, ISPEP
Marlene Vincent, Global Patient Advocacy Leader, Intercept Pharma
Keith Berelowitz, Founder/CEO, pRxEngage Inc
Rasmus Hjorth, Patient Engagement Director, James Lind Care
- Engagement with PAGs in Clinical Development Program development
- Clinical trials- PAG involvement to improve enrolment and retention
David Gillen, Chief Medical Officer, Norgine
- Identifying “unresolved tensions” between patient reality and health data goals
- Building a shared language and taxonomy in Digital health that serves people, not just platforms
- From ‘human in the loop’ to ‘human in the lead’ – identifying the skills and capabilities patients need to develop their own solutions
Derick Mitchell, Executive Director, PFMD
- Pioneering patient partnerships in a mid-size pharma company: not enough resources – what is the answer?
- Why it is important to co-create with patients and move beyond patient engagement
- A story about collaboration with TransCelerate
Vesela Aleksandrova, Clinical Operations Director, Shionogi B.V.
- In this session, we uncover how empathetic trial design and participant‐focused support drastically improve trial completion
- Insights on building trust, reducing anxiety, and supporting diverse patient needs.
- We bridge the gap between protocol design and lived patient experience, revealing what truly keeps participants engaged, motivated, and retained.
Miriam Dervan, Founder & CEO, mdgroup
Louise Spencer, Senior Clinical Manager, mdgroup
Joanne Kelly, Clinical Manager, mdgroup
- This presentation includes learnings and takeaways from different patient engagement projects.
- You will hear about what to do and not to do in order to succeed the best way possible with your patient engagement project.
Rasmus Hjorth, Patient Engagement Director, James Lind Care
ENABLING CONNECTED PATIENT EXPERIENCES
- Why evolve our focus from patient engagement to participation?
- Embracing Participation as key enabler of system-level change, beyond individual interventions: the Care Lab approach.
- Real-world missions in action: learnings from experience
- What mobilisation enables: extending care beyond healthcare institutions.
Marta Lago, Programme Co-lead, Healthcare Systems Transformation, The Care Lab
- Caregivers bridge fragmented digital healthcare systems, often carrying critical information between hospitals and services because no single, shared record exists.
- Excluding families from digital records in the name of privacy increases risk, forcing unsafe workarounds like repeated retelling of traumatic histories or reliance on memory in crises.
- Single-point, consent-based digital care plans can transform care, reducing caregiver burden, improving safety, and enabling true collaboration between families and clinicians.
Hannah Humphrey, Lived Experience Expert, Independent Patient Advocate
- A pioneering medical cannabis patient perspective on why lived experience must be treated as clinical expertise, not anecdote
- How decades of patient-led use outside regulated systems created knowledge healthcare can no longer afford to ignore
- What happens to safety, trust, and outcomes when patient expertise is excluded from innovation
- Practical lessons for clinicians, industry, and policymakers on partnering with patients as equals in care design
Clark French, Founder, United Patients Alliance (UPA)
PERSONALISED & INTELLIGENT SOLUTIONS
- Show how Thrive uses patient portals, mobile tools and virtual touchpoints to create real-time, two-way communication, giving people with a brain tumour immediate access to guidance, reassurance and personalised coaching.
- Demonstrate how continuous, data-informed support empowers patients and caregivers, helping them track symptoms, manage uncertainty, and stay connected to specialist advice between clinical appointments.
- Highlight the impact of digital therapeutics and structured coaching pathways within Thrive, showing how they improve self-management, emotional well-being, and overall quality of life throughout the brain tumour journey.
Dr Helen Bulbeck, Director of Services & Policy, brainstrust
- How an end-to-end approach—combining digital diagnostics (M-PREG) with mechanistically targeted therapeutics (MZe786)—can transform the early detection, risk-stratification, and treatment of preeclampsia.
- Lessons from developing and integrating a full diagnostic-to-therapeutic pathway, including biomarker science, algorithm validation, real-world implementation, and translational drug development.
May Rezai, Chief Operations Officer, MirZyme Therapeutics
- Why taste and sensory attributes matter
- Integration into the pharmaceutical development pathway
- Regulatory expectations and paediatric pathways:
- Impact on product lifecycle and market access
- Caregiver and behavioural insights
- Case learnings from published papers
- Opportunities for better cross-functional collaboration between formulation, regulatory, and patient-engagement teams to accelerate access
Dr Hend Abdelhakim, Asst Professor, Pharmaceutical Sciences & Healthcare Innovation, GBSH, UCL
- Critical intersection of technological advancements and the indispensable need for human empathy in various fields
- Delve into real-world examples of compassionate digital care illustrating how technology can be leveraged to enhance, rather than diminish, genuine human connection and support
- Provider perspectives on the challenges of engaging individuals in a digitally-driven environment, offering valuable insights into overcoming these hurdles
- How to effectively integrate innovation with empathy to create more impactful and human-centred solutions.
Moderator:
Olivia Kersey, Sibling Carer, Expert on Equity and learning Disabilities
Panellist:
Hannah Humphrey, Lived Experience Expert, Independent Patient Advocate
Lisa Kerr, Senior Director of Patient Engagement, Evinova
Keith Berelowitz, Founder/CEO, pRxEngage Inc
Robert Mitchell-Thain, Chief Executive Officer, PBC Foundation
