A Note From Our Chief Technology Officer
We have ambitious plans for 2025. In this edition of our newsletter, we’re excited to share some of what we’ve been working on – from new product features to a report surveying your peers to help us better serve you.
The results are clear: Traditional research methods aren’t meeting new needs of life sciences leaders. This only reinforces our commitment to delivering a solution that provides complete data, engages patients, and generates the research insights you need.
We’re honored to work with your company and deeply invested in the future of your research. Explore our latest updates, and as always, let us know how we can better support you.
Troy Astorino
Co-Founder & CTO at PicnicHealth
Find Troy and PicnicHealth at ISPOR 2025!
Using LLMs to Simplify Real-world Evidence Research
Latest Research By PicnicHealth
Optimizing EHR Data Completeness: A Conceptual Framework for Bringing Real-World Data into Clinical Research through Relevant Completeness
A Comparison of Single-Network and Multi-Site Approaches to Real-World Data Collection
Empowering Patients in Observational Research: Leveraging Data Insights for Sustained Engagement and Innovation
Evaluating Electronic Data Network and Direct Facility Retrieval Data Sources for Improved Patient Record Capture in Observational Studies
What's New at PicnicHealth
Introducing Our AI Assistant to Simplify Patient Care
Last fall, PicnicHealth unveiled an AI assistant that empowers patients to take control of their healthcare. Picnic simplifies medical records and provides actionable insights, enabling patients to make informed decisions. By integrating health data from any U.S. care site, Picnic breaks down data silos and makes it easier to navigate a complex healthcare system.
“We’re simplifying healthcare with a true unified patient record. With Picnic, we’re putting our world-leading medical AI directly in the hands of patients to track down and make sense of their medical data. This gives them a new level of understanding of their health history and enables them to navigate their care with confidence.”
-Troy Astorino, Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer at PicnicHealth
Patients who sign up for Picnic receive a complete timeline of their medical records as well as a unified care plan based on physician notes and advice. Picnic enables patients to ask specific questions about their health so that they can stay proactive. Picnic also provides:
Patients can ask questions about their health history and get GenAI-powered answers along with related data sources, such as lab results, procedures, and physician notes. Picnic scans all medical records to find relevant health information quickly and easily.
Patients can track specific health conditions like diabetes or cancer with a personalized, curated view of relevant medical data. Picnic analyzes health records and organizes related visits, test results, and medications in easy-to-find pinboards.
Patients can instantly understand complex medical terms as they review their medical records. Patients can highlight unfamiliar words and receive an easy-to-understand explanation from Picnic using their health history as context.
Product Corner
Beyond EMRs: Bringing Data Capture Home
Traditional trials often place significant burdens on both participants and research centers due to the necessity of frequent in-person assessments at trial sites. But there's a better way.
Our technology-enabled non-interventional method offers a fresh approach to trial participation, bringing assessments directly to the patient's home whenever possible. When in-person visits are unavoidable, we ensure patients have convenient access to local providers. This patient-centricity introduces a multitude of benefits, ultimately leading to more effective and insightful learnings for our research partners.
The PicnicHealth Advantage: Value-driven Data Capture
We're not just making trials easier; we're making them better. We provide our partners with virtual studies that are more:
- Cost-effective & Efficient: By reducing the need for physical site management and patient travel, remote trials significantly reduce costs, allowing for resources to be allocated where they matter most.
- Convenient, Enhancing Participant Access: Removing travel barriers allows us to engage a more diverse population. Participation becomes more accessible for patients in remote areas, those with mobility challenges, and individuals with demanding schedules, ultimately leading to more representative insights.
- Rich in Data Collection: More frequent – and even continuous – data gathering becomes possible. Consistent data collection opens the door for capturing new endpoints and a deeper understanding of participants' experiences, providing insights that traditional trials may miss.
- True Real-world Insights: By capturing data in participants' everyday environments, we gain more practical and applicable insights that truly reflect real-world experiences.
Our Supported Assessment Types
PicnicHealth offers a comprehensive suite of assessment types to meet the diverse needs of clinical trials:
- Diagnostics: We oversee biosample collection and custody from kit shipment through arrival at the central or local lab. We can also order and schedule specialized tests.
- Wearables: We capture data from consumer and medical devices. Sponsors can provide devices or patients can use their own.
- ePROs & Surveys: We deploy surveys from our existing library of 150 pre-built validated surveys and can rapidly build other validated and custom surveys for patients and caregivers.
- Telehealth & Other Clinical Assessments: We facilitate clinical assessments by healthcare professionals via televisits, at-home, or local facilities, ensuring patient adherence.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are some common questions and how PicnicHealth addresses them:
How do you address patient discomfort with at-home collection or use of unfamiliar devices?
For all studies, patients receive tailored onboarding and training sessions, comprehensive user guides, and a dedicated helpdesk. Our biospecimen kits come with comprehensive training, including instructional videos, written guides, and live virtual sessions, to ensure patients are comfortable and confident. When patients are required to use connected devices, they have a user-friendly interface, automated reminders, and integrated troubleshooting.
What labs do you use for specimen collection and analysis?
We partner with central and local labs across the country. All partner labs hold CLIA certification and receive standardized reference ranges and calibration details. We utilize validated shipping approaches with robust chain-of-custody procedures.
How do you select and ensure data accuracy from device vendors?
We partner with FDA-cleared or clinically validated vendors and conduct regular calibration and data quality audits. We work closely with you to match your study needs with the most effective device that considers the patient experience to maximize study compliance and data quality.
How do you select HCPs for my study?
We collaborate with accredited local facilities and ensure HCPs are appropriately qualified and trained on the study protocol, GCP, and the PicnicHealth systems they will use to interact with patients. HCPs are overseen by the study PI at PicnicHealth.
The Future is Here
PicnicHealth is committed to revolutionizing clinical trials by making them more accessible, efficient, and insightful. By bringing data capture directly to patients, we are unlocking new possibilities for research and ultimately contributing to better health outcomes.
Data with Dan
Multi-modal Data Retrieval for Enhanced Patient Journey Capture: Electronic Data Network (EDN) & Direct Facility Retrieval (DFR)
Answering complex research questions requires the ability to access endpoints from across a patient’s journey. Typically, patient data is spread across various providers, healthcare networks, and formats, making data access and retrieval more challenging. PicnicHealth’s approach captures complete journeys by retrieving data through electronic data networks (EDNs), which provide access to electronic medical records, and direct facility retrieval (DFR), which retrieves records directly from individual sites.
To understand the variation of data availability between each record source and how each improves record completeness, our researchers analyzed 474,000 medical records from 3,842 US-based PicnicHealth patients with confirmed multiple sclerosis diagnoses. The results of the analysis underscore the importance of a multi-modal approach to data retrieval for non-interventional research and its impact on record completeness.
Record Availability & Journey Representation
For this analysis, DFR records came from electronic, fax, and paper transfers from medical record offices. All EDN records came from networked digital sources commonly used in non-interventional research. Both EDN and DFR records included unstructured data, like doctor’s notes, which were rapidly abstracted and digitized through PicnicHealth’s proprietary technology.
Across included patients, data was readily available from both EDN and DFR sources. The median patient had 147 DFR records, and 83% of patients had 50 or more EDN records; this suggests that retrieval was not biased towards one viable source in the studied population.
In isolation, each source provided only a fragment of a patient’s medical journey – only 18% of visit records were found in both the EDN and DFR retrievals. Out of the complete visit history retrieved, EDN captured 63% of visits and DFR captured 55%.
When combined, EDN and DFR records expand the longitudinality of a patient’s medical history and enhance the data availability within that timeframe. In this analysis, the DFR records represented an average of 9.41 years of visit records per patient and the EDN records spanned an average of 9.34 years. But together, EDN and DFR records represented an average of 12.72 years of patient visits.
Multi-modal Non-interventional Research
The combination of EDN and DFR records significantly enhances the completeness of the patient journey, capturing longer and more complete medical histories than either source alone. In pursuit of more complex research questions, approaches like PicnicHealth’s that leverage multi-modal data sources, including EDN and DFR records, will be integral for high-quality research insights.
For a more comprehensive look at this data, find our poster at ISPOR 2025.
PicnicHealth in the News
pharmaphorum featuring Troy Astorino
PicnicHealth featuring Vera Hart
Medicine Maker featuring Noga Leviner
WebSummit featuring Troy Astorino
DIA Global featuring Noga Leviner
Drug Discovery & Development featuring Noga Leviner
Physician’s Weekly featuring Haley Friedler, MPH
Healthcare Technology Report featuring Noga Leviner
PicnicHealth’s Latest Publications
Employee Spotlight
Erin Smith, MPH, Patient Partnerships & Advocacy
Please share what your role is at PicnicHealth.
As the head of patient partnerships and advocacy, my role is to guide and empower cross functional stakeholders to effectively integrate the patient perspective and voice into the studies, features, and products that we deliver.
Can you share your background prior to joining PicnicHealth?
I started my career 20 years ago as a HIV test counselor and college health educator, developing health education and prevention programs for students and community members. It was a great introduction to the dynamics of public health, community engagement, and the political nuances of resourcing a chronically undervalued service. Since then, I’ve had the privilege of serving communities through various roles, from health program consulting for large government contracts to, most recently, a decade in rare disease patient advocacy.
What does your day-to-day at PicnicHealth look like?
On any given day, I’m connecting with patients and advocacy organization leaders about what is happening in their communities and bringing those insights back to our team to enhance our platform and inform research with our partners. I also work with our partners to understand their challenges answering key research questions for new treatments and therapies and problem solve solutions for them. When I’m not on a call, I’m researching the feasibility of engaging new communities or specific patient populations for studies on the PicnicHealth platform, and collaborating with our incredible recruitment and enrollment team to understand the impact we’re having on patients as we roll out new campaigns.
FUN FACT: I was a choir and musical theater kid from birth and still love to sing as loud as possible (but mostly in my car now, much to the dismay of my seven and nine-year-old children).
In Case You Missed It
New Industry Report: 2025 Leadership Sentiments in Observational Research
Earlier this year, we gathered insights from life sciences leaders regarding their current sentiments, challenges, and expectations for observational research in 2025. In partnership with Guidepoint, we anonymously surveyed 100 leaders across various therapeutic areas, revealing a key theme: Researchers are still facing challenges collecting the data they need, and their interest in technology-enabled research is growing.
Check out our key takeaways from the survey below. You can find a comprehensive overview of our findings in the 2025 Annual State of Observational Research Report.
64% note incomplete data as the most significant challenge when running a study
While incomplete data was the most common challenge, more than half of respondents indicated that patient engagement and retention, data quality, and costs were top challenges. These challenges may stem from traditional methods, as most are still using traditional methods to conduct research.
78% use or are open to using virtual observational study models with engaged patients
Despite relying on traditional methods, virtual methods are also being used. Virtual research methods bring significant cost savings and significantly reduce patient burden when compared to site-based research – especially for observational research. When asked about rolling successful long-term studies over to a virtual approach to save costs, 87% of respondents responded positively.
61% are utilizing AI or other advanced technologies in their research
The past few years have seen rapid adoption of AI across industries, and as the tools continue to advance and companies accept their revolutionary impact, utilization will only grow. More than half of respondents are already utilizing it in research, and for those who aren’t, the biggest reason why is a limited understanding of AI capabilities.
For a deeper deeper look into what life sciences leaders are thinking about in 2025, check out our full report.