Press Release

Basel, Switzerland. 18 November 2021. 

merakoi, a social impact company with the purpose to co-create healthcare solutions that help people better navigate life with a disease, today announced a partnership with Novartis Biome’s Evidence lab, a joint effort uniting all healthcare systems stakeholders, to shape the future of digital health solutions by incorporating patient insights.

With the launch of the Evidence Lab, Novartis Biome takes an important step to further develop and scale digital health solutions in partnership with patients and healthcare system partners. By facilitating the sharing of learnings and best practices across its network of partners, the Evidence Lab intends to reduce duplicative testing and promote faster scaling of solutions that are showing promise in related healthcare settings. The merakoi Patient Experts’ Lab enables this process by providing pain point sessions led by patient experts via a series of intensive patient-led sprints. 

Speaking about the collaboration, Silja Chouquet, co-founder of merakoi and Head of Strategic Partnerships said, “We are grateful to the Evidence Lab to have included us as a partner to co-create, test and validate solutions with our patient experts. Working directly with our patient experts will ensure lab participants solve the pain points that are the most relevant to patients.”

“We are very excited to partner with merakoi. The best digital healthcare innovations have the patient voice baked into the solution,” said Robin Roberts, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of the Novartis Biome. “Our goal is to make that standard practice ensuring we scale the most impactful and beneficial solutions for patients.”

Commenting on the launch of the Evidence Lab, merakoi patient expert, Marie Ennis-O’Connor, said, “Engaging patients is a necessary step in the development of digital technology that really makes a difference in the lives of patients and our caregivers. For digital health to empower patients, solutions must be co-created with those patients who will most benefit. This is a unique opportunity to put patients at the centre of healthcare innovation in ways that are truly meaningful to us.”

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About merakoi

merakoi is a social impact company with the purpose to co-create healthcare solutions that help people better navigate life with a disease. The merakoi Patient Experts’ Lab enables clients to co-create solutions suited to patient needs via a series of intensive patient-led sprints. As a global patient engagement services provider, we enable successful Patient Expert (Professional People living with disease) and healthcare company collaboration across multiple diseases and countries. We are EphMRA registered and offer rapid patient-led insight, co-design and co-creation solutions across the lifecycle, to the Pharmaceutical, Diagnostic and Devices industries.  Learn more at www.merakoi.com

About Novartis Biome

Novartis Biome is a bridge to help partners become an extension of Novartis own teams, working with them as easily and productively as possible to jointly innovate and co-develop digital solutions at scale.

The Biome is committed to partnering with the best in the ecosystem to combine deep scientific experience with the expertise of the tech world to develop – and crucially – scale digital solutions that improve and extend patients’ lives. Learn more Homepage | Novartis Biome