Bringing Clinical Trials Into the Neighborhood People Always, Patients Sometimes

Hi, I'm Tom Rhoads, CEO of Spencer Health Solutions. We are proud of the amazing work that pharmacies do to support patient health and wellbeing. The need for innovation in the clinical trial ecosystem has challenged traditional pharmacies to rethink their strategy since they are the ones with the greatest access to a diverse and underserved population. On this episode of People Always, Patients Sometimes, we hear from a member of the clinical trials team at Walgreens that recently announced a corporate launch into providing clinical trial services at neighborhood store locations. Adam Sampson, head of clinical delivery operations for Walgreens is one of the team members tasked with managing the plan at clinical trial services to brick and mortar locations by the end of the year. I hope you enjoy this conversation on People Always, Patients Sometimes.
 
Janet Kennedy: (00:53)
Hi, I'm Janet Kennedy and a member of the Spencer Health Solutions team. I'm looking forward to speaking with today's podcast guest, Adam Samson on People Always, Patients Sometimes. Adam is the Head of Clinical Delivery Operations for Walgreens, and he has a really big project in front of him. Welcome to the podcast, Adam!
 
Adam Samson: (01:12)
Thanks so much, Janet. I really appreciate you having me on the show.
 
Janet Kennedy: (01:15)
Well, you know, we've heard a little bit about you from my CEO, Tom Rhoads, but I'd really like to figure out how you got where you are today, especially from your startup background. So do you mind giving us a little bit of a catch up with your career and how you ended up where you are today?
 
Adam Samson: (01:31)
Yeah, I'd be glad to. So I started my career in clinical trials as many people do, you know the cliches - to say that we kind of fell into the industry. I was a registered dietician out of undergrad and very quickly found my way into interacting directly with patients as part of clinical trials and worked as a clinical research coordinator for a few years and transitioned from there about 10 years ago into the more business side of our industry. So I worked at a couple mid-size CROs, took a very standard path. I was a regional monitor, worked in project management in line management. And then about seven years ago, my wife and I moved out here to North Carolina and I worked at Duke Clinical Research Institute for a few years. While at Duke, I did a lot of work in government funded trials in the pediatric space and completed a master's degree through George Washington in clinical trials.
 
Adam Samson: (02:28)
And then I moved to a large pharma company and was conducting global, late phase studies. And then the pandemic hit, like many of us, I was, scrambling to keep my study going. You know, it's a hundred sites in eight countries. And how do we, possibly kind of keep operations, running lots of challenges. It was an eye opening experience around how in this industry, we really are under utilizing technology. That's no surprise to anyone we've gotten a bit better, but especially at that time, the start of the pandemic, getting even things like e-consent and other things approved was very challenging. So I decided to kind of take a leap of faith and join a very small time startup that was in the decentralized clinical trial space and had a great software product, but wanted to really build out their services and operations.
 
Adam Samson: (03:22)
I joined the team when there were about 15 people and was with the team until series B and about 130 people. It was a really exciting couple years and enjoyed working in that space of how do we bring trials into patients homes and give them additional options to participate in trials? The one thing that remains a pervasive challenge when we're trying to do decentralized trials is that technology of course, is not enough. Sometimes patients there's a lack of trust. If things come through via email or they see them on the internet, not everyb