Collaboration between Aetion’s Product and Science teams is the foundation of our ability to deliver scientifically rigorous, high-impact solutions to our customers. In our new blog series, Behind the Evidence: Conversations at the Intersection of Product and Science, we highlight A-teamers who work at the nexus of deep scientific expertise and real-world evidence (RWE) technology.
For the first installment, we sat down with Brenna Kirk, Associate Director, Science, to discuss her journey to Aetion after graduating with her Master's degree from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. We also explore her recent move to our Barcelona Tech Hub and her role as one of Aetion’s expert trainers, where she has the unique opportunity to work alongside customers to continuously enhance our products.
I joined Aetion as a Scientist back in 2019 after completing my Master's degree in Epidemiology. I was fortunate to be able to take a pharmacoepidemiology course with Aetion co-founder Sebastian Schneeweiss in my grad program, where we got to use Aetion® Substantiate to complete our final projects. I was immediately drawn to the possibility of using this tool to answer complex epi questions without having to be an expert in a program like SAS or R. Now, as an Associate Director on the Science team, I spend more time working directly with clients, helping them make key study design decisions and supporting teams implementing studies on our applications. I also interface regularly with Aetion’s Commercial team in pre-sales processes and with the Product team to share feedback throughout the product development process for new features.
When people are first introduced to Substantiate, I want them to really understand the implications of having a templated point-and-click interface to guide them through the implementation of a study, as opposed to writing and modifying code without any built-in guardrails. Scientific principles are built into the application, and they work!
For Aetion® Discover, I want people to take away how powerful it is to be able to generate descriptive data and corresponding visualizations in a matter of a few minutes. The newer machine learning features are also an important part of Discover—we don’t know what we don’t know but Discover has tools to help us capture and interpret what’s going on in the data.
One of our long-standing customers was implementing Discover. I was tasked with training an initial group of users on the product so they could introduce it to the larger organization. Through this approach, I was able to work hand in hand with the customer to learn exactly how they wanted to utilize Discover, which helped me tailor my training to their specific use cases. This group of users will now use Discover for rapid feasibility and explorations before continuing with more complex studies in Substantiate. The feedback from these users and our willingness to hear them out serve both to improve the product and provide an opportunity for greater stickiness of this application within our organization.
Right now, with Discover being relatively new and Substantiate having been the go-to tool for the Science team for so long, the question I ask is, can this be done in Discover? If not, Why? Discover is meant to be simple and fast, but when the task at hand gets more complicated, I know to go to Substantiate. Substantiate answers the deep questions and allows you to customize to your heart's content.
I’m genuinely excited about all of the new features I see, and I love learning about what’s being developed. I’ve been providing input for the tool that will enable clients to build their own measures in Substantiate and use them in Discover. To me, this addresses a huge customer need and will have a big impact on the stickiness of Discover with both new and existing clients.
In general, being in an office with colleagues and working on the products and applications we use makes it much easier to ask questions, get clarity, and provide feedback in a much more efficient way. I really look forward to opportunities for this kind of direct interaction.
It’s such a small detail and specific to all of the EU— not just Spain— but I think it's the small things that can really stick out when you’re acclimating to a new place. Whenever you open a bottle, like a bottle of water, the cap is tethered to the bottle! There’s a little plastic piece that doesn’t come off the same way that the bottles do back in the US. I think it’s so you don’t lose or throw away the cap…how’s that for product design?!
-> First word that comes to mind when you think of Aetion?
Science!
-> Favorite feature® in Aetion Discover?
Smart Risk profiles - they’re already a hit with customers!
-> One thing new users should always do first in Substantiate?
Check your dataset.
-> Aetion project or milestone you’re most proud of?
Completing two H2H vaccine effectiveness studies with one of our customers. Getting to design RWE vaccine studies in the COVID era seriously underlined why we do what we do—clients need our expertise and our technology to answer critical pharmacoepidemiology questions!
-> Barcelona must-try dish?
It’s gotta be patatas bravas - The availability of this tapa in so many places makes my potato-loving heart very happy!
Curious how Aetion’s science-driven technology can power your real-world evidence needs?Connect with our team to see a demo of Aetion® Substantiate and Discover in action.