Insights from Naomi Fried, PhD, Founder and CEO of PharmStars, on The Big Unlock Podcast
The healthcare industry has never had more innovative technologies at its disposal. Artificial intelligence is reshaping drug discovery. Digital therapeutics are changing patient care. Remote monitoring, predictive analytics, and personalized medicine continue to expand what’s possible.
Yet despite the pace of innovation, one challenge remains remarkably persistent: translating breakthrough ideas into real-world impact.
Many digital health startups develop promising technologies but struggle to gain traction with large pharmaceutical organizations. At the same time, pharmaceutical companies actively seek innovation but often find it difficult to identify partners capable of navigating their highly regulated, complex operating environments.
On the recent episode of The Big Unlock Podcast, host Ritu M. Uberoy spoke with Naomi Fried, PhD, Founder and CEO of PharmStars. Drawing on leadership roles at Kaiser Permanente, Boston Children’s Hospital, Biogen, and now PharmStars, Naomi offered a rare perspective from both sides of the innovation ecosystem. Her career has been devoted to one mission: helping startups and pharmaceutical companies work together more effectively to accelerate innovation and improve patient outcomes.
Rather than discussing technology trends alone, Naomi explored why successful innovation depends on understanding customers, building trust, and designing solutions that fit naturally into existing workflows.
Listen to the full conversation
Here are six of the most important insights from the conversation.
1. The Biggest Barrier Isn’t Technology: It’s the Pharma-Startup Gap
When Naomi joined Biogen after years of healthcare innovation leadership, she expected the transition to be straightforward. Instead, she discovered an entirely different operating environment. Pharmaceutical companies operate with different organizational structures, decision-making processes, regulatory requirements, risk tolerances, and timelines than most digital health startups. Even experienced healthcare innovators can underestimate this complexity. That realization eventually became the foundation for PharmStars.
Naomi describes this disconnect as the “pharma-startup gap.” It isn’t simply about different company sizes. It reflects fundamentally different ways of thinking, communicating, and operating. Startups typically prioritize speed, experimentation, and rapid iteration. Pharmaceutical companies prioritize evidence, governance, compliance, long development cycles, and risk management.
Neither approach is wrong.
But without understanding the other side, partnerships rarely move beyond early conversations. PharmStars was created to bridge this gap by educating startups about how pharmaceutical organizations function, helping them understand buyer expectations, and enabling pharma companies to engage with innovation more effectively. Since launching, more than 100 startups have completed the program, collectively generating over 100 partnerships with pharmaceutical companies while raising more than $1 billion in funding.
The lesson is simple but profound: Innovation accelerates when both sides learn each other’s language.
2. AI’s Greatest Opportunity May Be Hidden Inside Clinical Trials
Much of the discussion around AI in healthcare focuses on clinical documentation, patient engagement, or physician productivity. Naomi believes one of the biggest opportunities lies elsewhere. Clinical trials.
Drug development remains one of the most expensive and time-consuming processes in healthcare. Phase III clinical trials, in particular, require enormous investments in patient recruitment, retention, monitoring, data management, and regulatory oversight. Every month saved during development has significant financial implications because pharmaceutical companies operate against finite patent timelines.
AI and digital health solutions can help address challenges across nearly every stage of the clinical trial lifecycle:
- Identifying eligible participants faster
- Improving patient recruitment
- Reducing participant dropout
- Predicting operational risks
- Streamlining trial management
- Improving data quality
- Enhancing monitoring throughout the study
Beyond trials, Naomi also highlighted what she calls the “beyond the molecule” opportunity. Once a therapy reaches patients, digital solutions can improve adherence, monitor outcomes, personalize support, and strengthen long-term disease management. Rather than replacing pharmaceutical innovation, AI extends its value long after a medication reaches the market.
3. Great Pilots Are Designed for Scale From the Beginning
Healthcare has no shortage of successful pilots. What it lacks are successful implementations at scale. Naomi sees this challenge repeatedly throughout the pharmaceutical industry. Many innovation projects demonstrate promising early results before quietly disappearing. Why?
Because organizations often begin with technology rather than business outcomes. According to Naomi, every pilot should answer three questions before it starts:
- What problem are we solving?
- How will success be measured?
- What happens if the pilot succeeds?
That third question is often overlooked. Scaling should never be an afterthought. If adoption plans, operational ownership, funding, governance, and implementation pathways are discussed only after a pilot concludes, momentum is frequently lost.
Successful innovators define the path to enterprise adoption before the first implementation begins. Technology validates itself through measurable business value, not through demonstrations alone.
4. Workflow Integration Beats Feature Innovation
Naomi’s experiences at Kaiser Permanente and Boston Children’s Hospital reinforced one lesson that remains highly relevant today: Healthcare professionals don’t adopt technology because it’s innovative. They adopt technology because it makes their work easier.
Clinicians already manage demanding workflows, administrative complexity, and increasing documentation burdens. Even outstanding technology struggles if it introduces additional friction. Whether evaluating startups at Kaiser or helping physicians develop innovations at Boston Children’s, Naomi consistently focused on one question:
Does this solution fit naturally into the user’s workflow?
For startups, this requires extensive customer discovery before product development. It means observing clinical environments, understanding operational bottlenecks, learning where decisions are made, identifying who influences purchasing, and ensuring the technology reduces effort instead of creating more work.
Healthcare innovation succeeds when it becomes nearly invisible within existing workflows. That’s true for providers. It’s equally true for pharmaceutical organizations.
5. The Best Founders Listen More Than They Pitch
One of Naomi’s most memorable observations has little to do with AI or technology. It concerns communication. Many founders enter meetings eager to explain everything their product can do. The strongest founders do something different. They listen. Before discussing features, they ask questions. Before presenting solutions, they seek to understand problems. Before requesting partnerships, they build relationships.
Naomi encourages startups to research potential customers deeply before every conversation. For pharmaceutical companies, that means understanding therapeutic areas, pipelines, strategic priorities, organizational structures, and current challenges. Only then can startups position their solution in a way that genuinely resonates.
Technology opens doors. Relationships keep them open. Trust ultimately determines whether partnerships succeed. In highly regulated industries like healthcare and life sciences, credibility often matters as much as innovation itself.
6. The Best Innovators Never Stop Evolving
Another recurring theme throughout the discussion was adaptability. Healthcare changes continuously. Customer needs evolve, markets shift, new regulations emerge, AI capabilities improve almost weekly, and successful startups rarely follow the exact path they originally envisioned.
Naomi noted that many companies entering PharmStars already have successful products serving providers or payers. Rather than rebuilding their technology, they often reposition it for pharmaceutical use cases. The product may remain largely unchanged. What change are: the messaging, the customer, the business problem, and that ability to listen, learn, and reposition often determines long-term success. Innovation isn’t simply about creating new technology. It’s about continually ensuring technology solves the right problems for the right customers.
As Naomi explained, most startups will evolve significantly over time, and that’s exactly what successful innovation should look like.
The Real Catalyst for Healthcare Innovation
Many healthcare innovation conversations focus exclusively on emerging technologies. Naomi’s perspective stands apart because it spans every major stakeholder in the ecosystem. She has worked with startups searching for product-market fit and has led innovation inside one of America’s largest integrated delivery networks.
Naomi built innovation programs within a world-renowned children’s hospital. She experienced firsthand how pharmaceutical companies evaluate external innovation. And today, through PharmStars, she helps both sides collaborate more effectively. That breadth of experience allows her to identify patterns that others often miss. Her advice isn’t theoretical.
It reflects decades of practical experience helping organizations navigate the complexities of healthcare innovation. Perhaps her most valuable message is also the simplest:
Technology alone doesn’t create transformation. People, partnerships, and shared understanding do.
Final Thoughts
Healthcare innovation is entering a new phase. AI will undoubtedly accelerate drug discovery, optimize clinical trials, improve patient engagement, and transform pharmaceutical operations. But technology alone won’t determine success.
Organizations that create lasting impact will be those that understand their customers deeply, design solutions around real-world workflows, measure meaningful outcomes, and invest in long-term relationships rather than short-term transactions.
Naomi Fried’s journey from startup advisor to innovation executive to founder of PharmStars demonstrates that the future of digital health depends as much on collaboration as it does on technology.
As AI continues reshaping healthcare and life sciences, perhaps the greatest competitive advantage won’t be having the smartest algorithm. It will be building the strongest partnerships.
Listen to the Full Conversation
To hear Naomi Fried discuss digital health innovation, AI, pharmaceutical partnerships, startup strategy, and the future of healthcare innovation in greater depth, listen to this episode of The Big Unlock Podcast: “Bridging Pharma and Startups to Scale Digital Health Innovation.”