Underrepresentation of minorities in clinical research leads to issues such as health disparities, lack of trust in the medical system, limited access to new treatments and inaccurate treatment recommendations for those populations. So, it is important for clinical researchers to actively recruit and include diverse populations in their studies.
To overcome barriers to participation of diverse populations in clinical trials, TrialX launched a toolkit for sponsors and sites to create an end to end multilingual experience for patients. The Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) toolkit is a part of iConnect, an award-winning patient recruitment management platform which serves as a central system for patient recruitment operations at major pharmaceutical sponsors, large academic research centers and patient advocacy groups. The toolkit will have a wide ranging impact by bringing diversity and inclusion in the front and center of patient recruitment workflows.
Historically, minorities have been underrepresented in clinical trials. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently expanded its guidelines to improve diversity in clinical trials and increase participants from underrepresented populations in clinical trials. Language barriers are cited as one of the key reasons why potential participants feel reluctant to even start or continue their clinical trial journey. In the early 90’s when the Hispanic Community Health Study team launched recruitment efforts in several Hispanic communities in California, they quickly realized that many potential participants did not speak English. They were therefore unable to understand the study requirements or complete the necessary paperwork. The study team of this most comprehensive study of Hispanic/Latino health and disease in the United States had to hire bilingual staff to help explain the study in Spanish.
“About 21% of the population in the US uses a language other than English. We believe that in order to develop trust it is important for patients to understand clinical trial information in their preferred language. With the new DEI toolkit, we aim to address the challenge of diversity by enabling sponsors and sites to create an end-to-end multilingual experience for patients in finding and expressing interest in a clinical trial,” says Sharib Khan, CEO, TrialX.
The DEI toolkit provides innovative mechanisms for sponsors and sites to serve the information needs of diverse populations. Using the toolkit:
- Patient recruitment teams will be able to create study websites, pre-screeners and patient notifications in multiple languages, thereby expanding the potential reach of the study to a wide range of patient populations in different geographic regions and ethnic communities.
- Research sites can indicate the languages spoken by the study staff and potential participants can filter research sites based on their preferred language.
- Study teams will be able to collect race, ethnicity and preferred language information from the volunteers registered in the iConnect volunteer registry and reach out to these volunteers based on these preferences and demographics.
- Patient recruitment operations team and study managers will be able to get real-time insights with the new Diversity Reporting Dashboard that provides actionable insights for them to meet the diversity enrollment targets on time.
TrialX is committed to developing innovative patient-centric solutions to tackle the diversity challenges faced by the industry. If you are interested in learning more about the DEI toolkit and the iConnect patient recruitment platform please contact us here.
