From pilot to practice: Reflections from UCB’s Epilepsy Digital Roundtable on scaling go-to-market strategies

At UCB, our ambition is to help people living with severe diseases by delivering solutions that improve patient outcomes and achieve sustainable impact. On December 3^rd, 2025, we held our third Epilepsy Digital Roundtable, bringing together healthcare leaders to explore a critical challenge in digital health: how we can scale go-to-market (G2M) strategies, so that impactful digital health solutions reach the people who need them most. Digital health is a key driver of more personalized and accessible healthcare, using technologies, such as apps, sensors and AI, to improve care delivery. With so many tools emerging, this roundtable was essential in helping us focus on translating innovations into real-world impact.

For me, this roundtable is more than professional; it is deeply personal. My niece was diagnosed with epilepsy and witnessing her and my family’s daily struggles since then has been eye-opening. The unpredictability of seizures, complexity of care, and the emotional toll highlight a stark reality: despite medical advances, people living with epilepsy still face enormous challenges. This experience motivates me to push for progress through solutions that are scalable, sustainable, and embedded in real-world care.

The discussion this year reflected clear priorities. We reaffirmed our ambition to go beyond medicine, focusing on holistic digital care models. This includes addressing earlier diagnosis, improving care coordination, incorporating seizure detection and real-time monitoring, and tackling unmet needs such as cognition, sleep, and sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP). Achieving these goals will require partnerships built not only around funding, but around true co-creation that enables streamlined integration into existing care pathways.
 

The roundtable journey

Over the past three years, these roundtables have become a valuable forum for collaboration, bringing together entrepreneurs, clinicians, payers, caregivers, and pharmaceutical partners to address system-wide barriers. Earlier sessions focused on reimbursement pathways and regulatory frameworks. This year, we asked a new set of questions: how can we accelerate adoption, clarify stakeholder roles, and define how pharma can help shape the future of healthcare.
 

Defining the opportunity for digital health

During this roundtable, we brought together a group of innovators and stakeholders, including Allos, Auralyn (spinout of Byteflies), Beacon Biosignals, Clouds of Care, EpiWatch®, Eysz, Farow, Neurava, NeuroHelp and NextSense.

Participants aligned on two areas essential for unlocking scale:

• Building sustainable funding and pricing models

• Integrating solutions into care pathways to build trust and deliver real-world value.

Several of the stakeholders in attendance are advancing models that leverage electroencephalography (EEG) to improve seizure detection and real-time monitoring. These approaches not only offer greater clinical precision but also generate real-world data, crucial for demonstrating outcomes and improving patient care.

A consistent message throughout our discussion was that digital innovation only works when it reduces burden for families, clinicians, and the healthcare system. While payers are asking for measurable outcomes, startups highlighted that normalization and workflow integration – not algorithms – are the real barriers to adoption.

In one keynote, speakers challenged the group to focus on digital tools that succeed by solving urgent, high-impact problems, rather than offering ‘nice-to-have’ features. Avoiding what was called "pilot purgatory" and showing clear, reproducible impact in real-world settings is essential. Ultimately, it’s about “building painkillers, not vitamins”.
 

The challenge: Why does adoption of digital tools stall?

Epilepsy care is evolving beyond seizure control to include precision medicine and digital innovation, from genetic testing to AI-powered monitoring.

Yet despite this progress, most digital solutions remain underused. Why? Because key barriers persist:

• Unclear business models and limited integration into clinical workflows

• Fragmented standards and insufficient reimbursement pathways

• Slow uptake among providers and payers, even when benefits are proven.

If these barriers remain unaddressed, patients will continue to miss out on innovations that could improve outcomes and quality of life.
 

Creating shared values across the eco-system

In my conversations with startups and care teams, I have seen brilliant ideas stall when their value isn’t clearly communicated. Creating shared value means finding solutions that meet the needs of everyone involved. For patients and caregivers that could mean improving quality of life and easing care coordination. For clinicians it means providing tools that integrate seamlessly into existing workflows. And for pharmaceutical partners it includes generating real-world data and accelerating trials.

During the “G2M Collaboration Opportunities” panel, participants explored how aligning values across pharmaceutical, payer and patient perspectives can unlock real-world adoption. Aligning these priorities early helps us design better tools, run more effective trials, and contribute meaningfully to the epilepsy community. As one payer noted, creating shared value across the ecosystem, “is not easy, it requires a lot of collaboration… Being very transparent about where you are on the evidence journey and the goals you’re trying to achieve.” A caregiver added, “It’s a very connected ecosystem. You cannot change one part without changing the other.”

To succeed, we must build shared frameworks that help define, communicate, and incentivize the values of digital tools, establishing clearer standards for collaboration and implementation.
 

Building trust through real-world validation

Trust depends on evidence, relevance, and transparency. Participants emphasized the need for credible, practical evidence that resonates with clinicians, administrators, patients, and payers/ regulatory agencies. One founder stated, “You need to take the data and change it to something useful.”

A clear theme emerged: while real-world evidence is valuable, it must also be robust, explainable and co-developed with stakeholders. Clinicians want simplicity. Caregivers want responsiveness. Payers want transparency and rigor.

Evidence generation must go beyond regulatory endpoints to include usability and experience, for both patients and those delivering care. For patients and caregivers, this means tools that are accessible, intuitive, and genuinely helpful in daily life. For providers, it means solutions that are efficient, reduce burden and integrate smoothly into existing workflows. This takeaway reinforced UCB’s belief that initiatives must prioritize measurable outcomes, both clinical and economic, to support scale.
 

Integrate into the heart of care

Generating evidence is only part of the journey – to make a real difference, digital solutions must move from proven pilots to everyday practice. That requires true integration into care delivery. We often talk about “embedding into workflows,” but what that really means is making life easier for those on the front lines, whether they are clinicians juggling competing demands or caregivers navigating complex decisions. Solutions must work within existing systems, not around them.

Startup founders shared the challenge of aligning with fragmented systems and emphasized the need for early collaboration with implementation partners. This aligns with UCB’s broader ambition, to support integration into care where appropriate. One founder noted “Patient Advocacy Groups built trust and credibility for us while we solve core problems for them”, he then went on to say, “We could acquire patients through patient advocacy groups and collect all their longitudinal medical data WITHOUT contracting with health systems or doing EMR integrations… this removed ALL friction”.

It was also clear that the ecosystem is asking for more unity. Patients juggle multiple apps, clinicians are drowning in data, and payers struggle with disconnected value narratives. A unified, interoperable approach is not just ideal, it is urgently needed.

A collective commitment to care

This roundtable was more than a meeting; it was a catalyst for change. It surfaced new ideas, challenged assumptions, and reaffirmed our belief that partnership is the foundation of progress. 

Digital health stands at a pivotal moment. In 2024, three in five US physicians indicated using some form of healthcare AI – a sharp rise that signals growing clinical adoption of digital tools and increasing interest in value-based reimbursement. Yet without clear G2M pathways, many innovations risk stalling. That is why collaboration across the ecosystem is more critical than ever.

A heartfelt thank you to all our speakers and partners for your passion and insights. Your contributions will inspire our next steps as we strengthen partnerships, create sustainable models, and deliver solutions that truly make a difference for patients and their families.