The 7 Fatal Traps of Evidence Generation and What CPMs Need to Know About Building Trusted Products
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Good afternoon friends, this is issue No. 006. This week we’re discussing how to generate compelling evidence for your clinical product with special guest Paul Wicks of Wicks Digital Health.
The 7 Fatal Traps of Evidence Generation
If you want your clinical product to succeed, it’s never too early to think about proving it robustly.
Think back to those days when you’d read a headline about a “cancer breakthrough” or sit through a pharma rep’s hard sell with free pens in hand. That’s the level of skepticism you should expect.
Investors, regulators, clinicians, IT departments, procurement officers, patient groups… will all ask the same thing: “What’s the evidence this is safe and effective?”
This month I sat down with Paul Wicks, PhD. With 200+ peer-reviewed publications, former BMJ board member, and evidence strategist to Ada, Thread, and Woebot, he’s truly an expert on evidence generation. He spilled the tea on where teams go wrong and how you can do better.
1. The Pilot Trap
Pilots are for learning, not bragging rights. 🫢
Use them to test usability, acceptability and workflow fit. Run simple surveys, but lean on structured tools like uMARS (a method to assess the quality of mobile health (mHealth) apps) plus an accessibility or engagement scale, such as system usability scale (SUS) or mHealth App Usability Questionnaire (MAUQ). Capture physician impressions explicitly.
And don’t wait to draft the ROI story. Even at pilot stage you can start collecting:
Time saved
Safety signals
Outcome movement
Your first champions will come from this data. Don’t underestimate its importance.
👉 Practical steps:
Define 2–3 metrics before the pilot (e.g. time saved, completion rates).
Add 1–2 validated usability tools (uMARS, SUS).
Run a short clinician debrief at pilot close.
Draft a one-pager ROI story from the pilot data.
2. The Academic Hand-off Trap
Great collaborators are busy. Teaching and clinics always win.
If you want the paper published, budget for a medical writer. Their job? Herd cats, chase deadlines, keep the manuscript moving.
Remember: you co-own the Gantt, not just the acknowledgements.
👉 Practical steps:
Budget for a freelance medical writer.
Map author roles + deadlines early.
Check journal requirements upfront.
Book recurring “manuscript progress” calls.
3. The Missing Breadcrumbs Trap
If you can’t reconstruct what you did, regulators and peer reviewers will challenge you on it.
Document your product’s development rationale. Pick a checklist from EQUATOR (an organisation that seeks to improve the reliability and value of published health research literature) like CONSORT, SPIRIT-AI, PRISMA. Use their toolkit to pick the appropriate reporting guideline.
Write a protocol. Get ethics approval (HRA/REC in the UK). Keep a live methods log: versions, inclusion/exclusion, deviations, dates.
A little extra time upfront will save you hours of painful unpicking in future and will make publication more straightforward.
👉 Practical steps:
Pick the right EQUATOR checklist on day 1.
Draft a 2-page protocol (objectives, methods).
Keep a live log of protocol deviations.
Seek ethics approval before collecting data.
4. The Marketing Trap
Slides with “3x safer” look pretty.
Slides with “3x safer” and a citation at the bottom to (Wicks et al., Lancet Digital Health, 2025)? Those get funded. Keep the glossy numbers, then underpin them with peer-reviewed citations.
Procurement officers, ICBs, and regulators need (or like?) PDFs they can staple to a business case. Citations are your best objection handler.
👉 Practical steps:
Pair every headline stat with a citation.
Create a “citation pack” PDF for sales.
Train commercial teams to reference publications in pitches.
5. The Perfection Trap
Waiting for the one RCT to rule them all? That’s how pipelines stall.
Think portfolio. DiMe’s Evidence DEFINED playbook is right: stack methods papers, feasibility studies, service evaluations, and trials so they tell a coherent arc over time.
Publish the nulls too. Incremental improvement is more credible than “digital perfection.”
👉 Practical steps:
Draft an evidence roadmap (Year 1–3).
Publish all studies, even negative ones.
Use DiMe’s Evidence DEFINED playbook as a checklist.
Frame your portfolio as an arc, not a one and done
6. The Conference Engine
Abstract deadlines force you to write.
Submit to the right clinical meetings. Align authorship early. Let the poster become the manuscript spine. Then amplify:
Post PDFs on Figshare (an open-access platform to upload, store, and share research outputs (like posters, datasets, or papers) with a DOI for easy citation
Share DOIs (A DOI is a unique, permanent link that points directly to the paper, poster, or dataset you’ve published)
Write a tight LinkedIn thread
Evidence ignored is evidence wasted.
👉 Practical steps:
Track abstract deadlines in a shared calendar.
Assign an “abstract owner” per study.
Post posters/PDFs on Figshare.
Draft at least 1 LinkedIn post per output.
7. Validation vs Usability (choose on purpose)
Patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) widely used to measure the severity of diseases were born on clipboards with 40 questions and infinite clinic time. Phones don’t have that luxury.
If you swap the SF-36 or a PHQ-9 for an emoji slider you might win on completion rates, but you just traded external validity for vibes. Be explicit about the trade. Pre-register it and validate it still suits your needs (you can always field the full version in a Qualtrics survey later).
Always check licensing; many instruments require written permission or fees. Skipping that invites legal disputes and retractions (Paul has lived this painful experience!)
👉 Practical steps:
Decide early: validity vs engagement.
Pre-register if using modified tools.
Run a small validation sample (n=50).
Check licensing before launch.
Bonus: Publication Is Only Halfway There
Once it’s out in print, operationalise it and take yourself out of the calendar invites.
Your marketing colleagues will almost certainly want your support to help them develop sales enablement one-pagers, PR pitches, webinars for clinicians, internal brown bags for customer success, onboarding snippets for users and many more.
You can save time by making a 5 slide summary of your research and recording a Loom with a talk track demoing where evidence fits in your product so you don’t have to join every one of those calls.
And finally, close the loop with participants. They are your first community.
👉 Practical steps:
Build a 5-slide summary as soon as accepted.
Record a Loom walkthrough for marketing/sales.
Create a reusable sales enablement template.
Email results back to participants.
The Bottom Line
Evidence isn’t paperwork. It’s your growth engine.
Avoid these traps, and you don’t just get published, you build trust with clinicians, regulators, buyers, and patients.
If you’re at the start of your evidence journey (or knee-deep and stuck), Paul Wicks is a great person to learn from. Reach him at paul@wicksdigitalhealth.com or follow him on LinkedIn.
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Written by Dr.Louise Rix, Head of Clinical Product, doctor and ex-VC. Passionate about all things healthcare, healthtech and clinical product (…obviously). Based in London. You can find me on Linkedin.
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