Expertise in Action: Turning the Patient Voice into Evidence That Matters

Expertise in Action: Turning the Patient Voice into Evidence That Matters 

In Expertise in Action, ProductLife Group highlights the people whose expertise helps shape better decisions across the life sciences lifecycle. For Marta Comellas, that means ensuring that patient experience is not seen as peripheral, but as a critical source of evidence. 

Healthcare innovation is often assessed through scientific and clinical outcomes. But real impact also depends on understanding how treatments affect the lives of the people receiving them. Marta’s work in outcomes research and patient-centered research helps bridge that gap, connecting scientific rigor with what matters most to patients. 

A particularly meaningful example of this impact is the development of patient decision aids. These projects help shift the care model from one that is predominantly physician-centered to one in which patients are better informed, more engaged, and more able to participate in decisions about their own treatment. 

The challenge lies in translation: not between languages, but between scientific complexity and lived experience. Clinical evidence needs to become understandable, relevant, and usable for patients. When that happens, the result is not only better-informed decision-making, but a more meaningful relationship between innovation and care. 

For clients, this also creates value beyond the treatment itself. By developing tools and evidence that support patient engagement, companies position themselves as contributing to more integrated and value-based healthcare models, where decisions are guided not only by clinical efficacy but by outcomes that improve quality of life. 

Marta brings more than thirteen years of experience at the intersection of science, health authority expectations, and the patient’s daily reality. Her role is to ensure that the patient voice becomes robust evidence capable of informing medical, regulatory, and strategic decisions, rather than remaining a symbolic concept. 

This has required persistence. Earlier in her career, patient-reported outcomes were often considered too subjective to carry the same weight as more traditional clinical variables. One of the key challenges she has faced has been helping demonstrate that patient experience can be measured with rigor and should be treated as a meaningful component of healthcare evidence. Today, that shift is increasingly visible across the industry. 

For Marta, excellence in this field is defined by engagement. It means using methodology with rigor, while never losing sight of the people behind the data. Scientific quality matters, but its true value lies in whether it helps translate patient needs into action. 

At PLG, this work is strengthened by cross-functional collaboration across disciplines such as Regulatory, Safety, and Market Access. That integrated approach helps ensure that the patient perspective is not isolated in a report, but connected to decisions that shape development, access, and healthcare delivery. 

Ultimately, Marta’s work helps make life sciences innovation more relevant, more human, and more aligned with the outcomes that matter most.

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