Presenter: Paul Wicks PhD — Founder of Proofstack; Honorary Professor of Digital Health; 25 years in the field; 200+ peer-reviewed publications; editorial roles at The BMJ, BMC Medicine, JMIR, Digital Biomarkers, and The Patient
Date: 5 May 2026
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Session materials
Recording: Watch the full session (35:24)
Slides: View the deck
Discussion: Continue in #hemingway-sessions
Luma event: Event page
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Every digital health team knows evidence matters, but publication still feels too slow, too expensive, and too disconnected from the decisions teams actually need to make right now. In this Hemingway Session, Paul Wicks unpacked why and showed what to do about it.
Drawing on 25 years of work — first in motor neurone disease research at King's College London, then 13 years leading innovation at PatientsLikeMe, and now as founder of Proofstack — Paul made the case that publishing slowly isn't a writing problem. The bottleneck is the waiting in between handoffs: scheduling, journal scope mismatch, peer review delays. Once you see that, the playbook changes. You stop treating each paper as a heroic one-off and start treating evidence as a portfolio: a mixed diet of editorials, letters, posters, and trials, each chosen deliberately, each prepared with a publication brief and a pre-submission inquiry before anyone opens a Word doc.
Key takeaway: Evidence is a design decision, not a writing decision. The teams that win build an intentional evidence plan around how decisions get made across the buyer lifecycle — not around hopes that one perfect RCT will land.
Paul opened with the personal urgency that drives the work. His PhD research at King's College London was in motor neurone disease (ALS), where patients had on average 18 months to live after diagnosis. Each volunteer in his studies gave up 3 to 5 of their remaining 500 days for two PET scans, an MRI, and an 8-hour neuropsychology battery. The promise he made in return: their contribution would benefit the next person diagnosed.
But by the time the publication found its journal, two years had passed. Everyone he had seen was no longer with us — and that was true across more than 12,000 ALS patients he worked with over the years.
That experience generalizes to digital health. AI-driven mental health tools get published comparing themselves to ChatGPT 3.5 — Jurassic-era technology by the time the paper lands. Companies run out of money before their evidence comes out. Skeptical clinicians keep waiting for peer-reviewed data. The slow pace of publishing isn't just an inconvenience — it has a real cost in lives, dollars, and field-level trust.
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The 500 days promise
Paul opens with the personal urgency that drives his work in digital health: the ALS patients who gave him 3-5 of their remaining 500 days, and what happened when his publication finally came out two years later.
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Paul named the five challenges he sees most often: