RADIANT and the Rise of the Patient Voice in Healthcare
Posted on
“No matter how much technology we bring into the system, healthcare is a human enterprise.” — Adam Resnick, PhD, Co-Executive Director of the Center for Data-Driven Discovery in Biomedicine (D3b) at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
For too long, medicine has happened to patients. Families have contributed data, enrolled in studies, and endured treatments, yet discoveries often remain locked away in research for years before ever reaching the bedside. Decisions were made without their input, and many felt excluded from the conversation about their own care.
RADIANT—Real-time Analysis and Discovery in Integrated and Networked Technologies—changes that. It brings families into the process as active partners. By merging medical records, genetic information, and scans simultaneously, RADIANT empowers patients and clinicians alike to see more options, act with greater precision, and share in shaping the future of care.
It’s a new way forward: data democratized, privacy safeguarded, and decision-making shared.
Why the Patient Voice Matters
Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN) was modeled with the belief that data, when shared, can accelerate cures. But sharing data is only part of the equation. The other is recognizing patients and families as essential voices in that process.
“RADIANT is going to bridge that gap between research and clinical care by bringing in multiomic data, imaging data, and clinical data into a common environment,” explains Resnick. “Through AI-empowered tools, we can deliver real-time personalized information back to the clinician and the patient.”
This is a cultural breakthrough as much as it is a technical one. By ensuring discoveries reach the point of care faster and building systems with consent and security at the core, RADIANT shifts the relationship between patients, families, and medicine—elevating their role from passive participants to active partners in the process.
An Advocate’s Perspective
Few voices capture this shift more clearly than Amanda Haddock, President of Dragon Master Initiative. As both a parent and a patient advocate, Amanda understands the weight of the patient experience and the importance of amplifying it.
“Traditionally, medicine has been done to patients,” Amanda shared in our recent video. “What RADIANT is going to do is make patients more of a participant in their own care and in that research process. They’ll have more of a voice because they’re able to share in that way. They’ll be able to help guide where research and care is going for the future.”
Her perspective captures what makes RADIANT transformative: participation with purpose. When doctors and patients come together, research becomes more responsive, care becomes more precise, and trust deepens across the entire system.
Shaping the Future of Care
RADIANT reimagines the infrastructure of biomedical discovery while keeping families at its heart. Lawmakers, institutional leaders, and researchers all have a duty to ensure that the patient voice is built into the design of new systems from the beginning. By bringing together diverse data—medical records, genetics, imaging—and enabling real-time interpretation through secure, privacy-protected frameworks, RADIANT demonstrates that research and care don’t need to live on separate tracks. They can move forward together, powered by partnership.
For the CBTN, this is the natural extension of a decade of collaborative science. By uniting dozens of institutions around the world and creating the largest open pediatric brain tumor dataset, CBTN has already shown the power of collective effort. RADIANT amplifies this by weaving patients more fully into that collaboration, ensuring their needs guide the discoveries that follow.
As CBTN’s Resnick reminds us, the promise of RADIANT is a human one. By elevating the patient voice, RADIANT and CBTN are building a future where medicine is more personal, more precise, and more humane—where patients stand not on the sidelines of discovery, but at its center.
Hear from Adam Resnick, Amanda Haddock, and other RADIANT architects in the new RADIANT vision video and see how this game-changing program is transforming the role of patients in research and care.