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title: Impact — Michael Vinegra
description: "Outcome stories from two decades in pharma and biotech: AI trial matching with IBM Watson, digital recruitment at scale, and enterprise transformation."
image: https://vinegra.com/hubfs/social/og-card.png
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# Impact

A few examples of what leading at the intersection of clinical development, medical affairs, and technology looks like in practice.

## AI trial matching, at the point of care

**The challenge.** Matching cancer patients to the right clinical trial is slow, manual, and error-prone — and most eligible patients are never even considered.

**What I did.** I led the enterprise IBM Watson alliance to build EMR-based, AI/ML clinical-trial matching, partnering with Mayo Clinic, Massachusetts General Hospital, MD Anderson, and a community oncology practice — spanning academic and community care on purpose.

**The outcome.** The work put AI eligibility screening into real oncology workflows and was later reflected in a 2020 *JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics* paper. Years before generative AI, it proved the lesson the industry is only now absorbing: in regulated care, governance and workflow — not the model — are the hard part.

## Turning trial recruitment into a measurable engine

**The challenge.** Clinical-trial recruitment spend was flowing to agency fees instead of reaching patients, with little visibility into what actually worked.

**What I did.** As Executive Director of Digital Development at Novartis, I built an end-to-end digital recruitment platform — enterprise web, omnichannel media, and an analytics backbone tracking campaigns across disease states for Phase II and III studies.

**The outcome.** By flipping the agency-fee-to-working-media ratio from 80:20 to 20:80, I redirected roughly **$4 million** into working media across five trials in the first year — and gave the organization, for the first time, a clear read on recruitment performance.

## Standing up a digital transformation from scratch

**The challenge.** Oncology clinical development needed a real digital capability, not a slide deck — and the infrastructure to support it did not exist.

**What I did.** At Eisai, I led the Oncology Digital Transformation strategy and roadmap, created the Executive Steering Committee, and ran five cross-functional workstreams spanning data FAIRification, AI, insights platforms, process, and user-centricity — and led the selection and implementation of three enterprise platforms and four divisional ones.

**The outcome.** A durable operating capability — platforms, governance, and people — plus five “Emerging Leader” graduates I coached in digital leadership and Agile product ownership.

## Building a business, not just a function

**The challenge.** A new-media services capability had to be built and sold into Fortune 50 pharma clients from almost nothing.

**What I did.** I built and led a new-media business unit and client-services team, creating and delivering digital programs across a matrixed client environment.

**The outcome.** I grew the office from 4 employees and $350K in billings in 2002 to 27 employees and more than $4 million in revenue by 2006 — the build-from-scratch leadership I have since brought inside global pharma.

## Want the fuller version?

These are the short versions. [Book a conversation](https://meetings.hubspot.com/michael-vinegra/meeting-with-michael-vinegra) and I will walk you through any of them.

[linkedin-in icon](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mvinegra) [ResearchGate](https://www.researchgate.com/)

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