Debunking Myths to Boost Clinical Trial Enrollment Diversity: Susan Vadaparampil, PhD, MPH

Susan Vadaparampil, PhD, MPH, of Moffitt Cancer Center, concludes her conversation with The American Journal of Managed Care^® at last month’s Institute for Value-Based Medicine® event in Tampa, Florida, by addressing a common misconception about diverse clinical trial enrollment and sharing actionable steps institutions can take to debunk it.

Watch parts 1 and 2 to learn more about barriers to clinical trial enrollment and strategies to overcome them.

This transcript was lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

What is a common misconception about diverse clinical trial enrollment that needs to be corrected, and what steps can institutions take to address it and make real progress?

I'll go with the last myth that I mentioned, the myth, or the perception, that institutions are trying to focus on diversity in clinical trials only because they need to meet a quota and not because they care about the community.

One thing that we found to be effective is to share information about progress in clinical trials that specifically have impacted disparities experienced by that community, to show that the reason that we want diverse enrollment in trials is because we want to make sure that our advances truly benefit the entire community. But that's on us to find those examples and highlight them in a way that resonates with that community.

We talked a lot about going out into the community and educating individuals, but I also want to highlight that to really improve trial diversity, we have to reflect inward as well. That is, what does our trial portfolio look like? Does it really match the cancer burden of the community that we serve? How are we tracking and monitoring who's coming to our center who would then be eligible for trials, and does that reflect the sociodemographic characteristics of the larger population that we serve?

I think that when we think about improving clinical trial diversity, yes, of course, we need to think about the community and patients, but we also need to think about the center, the providers that deliver the care, both in the center and in the community, and what support and resources we can give them to make data-driven decisions about trials that would then enhance diversity.