Dr Chesahna Kindred: Diverse Clinical Trials Are a Long-Game to Close the Health Equity Gaps

Author(s):

Chesahna Kindred, MD, MBA, FAAD, board-certified dermatologist, Kindred Hair & Skin Center, discusses how diversity in clinical trials are helping bridge the racial health equity gap in psoriasis care.

Researchers and clinicians must effectively translate findings from diverse clinical trials into practice through medical journals, conferences, and continuous education to bridge gaps in health equity, says
Chesahna Kindred, MD, MBA, FAAD, board-certified dermatologist, Kindred Hair & Skin Center.

This transcript was lightly edited.

Transcript

How can researchers and clinicians ensure that the findings from clinical trials involving diverse populations are accurately represented and effectively translated into the clinical practice?

What’s great is that's the natural flow of knowledge. Our knowledge naturally comes from clinical trials into when we see the patient. Meaning, we have a clinical trial, those results go into the medical journal. The medical journals are what we use to write our medical textbooks. Medical textbooks is how we teach our medical students, who then become physicians that treat patients. That's just a natural flow. So, the importance is that the clinical trials are diverse, and that's that long game of closing the gap of the race-health-equity gap that we have. This is actually how we operate. It almost always starts with a clinical trial.

As we know from clinical trials, there's always spin offs. So, when I see something quite interesting, that might give me an idea to then do a little mini study with my patients. Saying, "I'm going to see if this medication does indeed work better for scalp psoriasis [which is] more common in Blacks," and then we go from there. But for it to be accurately represented is typical.

For those of us that are already in practices, and we're not in medical school, we read our journals, but conferences are where we go to learn. It's a one-stop shop. So, in private practice, we don't quite have the same time allotted to education. To take time away from seeing patients and go to a conference, that's where we learn up to date information and then apply it into our clinical practice.