The Big Lie in Clinical Trials
Why EMRs Won’t Save Your Study
Simon Arkell, founder and CEO of ryght.ai was my guest this week on Life Sciences Today.
It’s not every day my guest is a founder and Olympic athlete.
Simon is a two-time pole-vault Olympian and seven-time founder who came to the US from Australia on an athletic scholarship at the University of New Mexico.
And the rest is history.
What really struck me wasn’t the medals or the exits — it was how willing he is to call bullshit on the way our industry “has always worked.”
Simon’s new company, Ryght.ai, is taking a flamethrower to the slowest, most fragile part of clinical development: site selection and activation.
Instead of begging for EMR integrations and pretending that “lots of patients” is a real strategy, they’ve built digital twins for 100,000+ sites in 192 countries, then layered on agentic AI to find, rank, and activate the right sites and PIs in days, not months.
The biggest anti-pattern Simon calls out? Our collective obsession with EMR access as the golden key to enrollment.
In reality, EMR data is one noisy variable among many — and often the least interesting one. Site incentives, operational capacity, competing studies, PI conflicts, regulatory history: these are where trials live or die. Focusing on EMR first is like judging a pole vaulter by their warmup jog.
In this episode of Life Sciences Today, we dig into how Ryght.ai works, why enrollment failure is mostly a site problem, and what happens when you design with AI from first principles instead of bolting it onto legacy workflows.
Listen here Beyond the EMR: Simon Arkell Rewires Clinical Trials – Life Sciences Today Podcast Episode 53
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