How diverse are your clinical trials?

If you work in clinical trials, how easy is it for you to report out on participant diversity metrics across all your clinical trials?

This question came to mind this weekend when the whole topic of racial bias as it relates to the effectiveness of medical devices, was thrust firmly into the spotlight by Sajid Javid the Health Secretary. Javid has commissioned a review following research that showed that pulse oximeters were found to be less accurate when used on people with darker skin.

He said there was racial bias in some medical instruments, adding: "It's unintentional but it exists." "And the reason is that a lot of these medical devices, even some of the drugs, some of the procedures, some of the textbooks, most of them are put together in majority-white countries and I think this is a systemic issue around this," he said.

Back to my original question – If you work in clinical trials, how easy is it for you to report out on participant diversity metrics across all your clinical trials?

Clearly, reporting on the diversity mix in your clinical trials doesn’t automatically make you the sponsor, one who has the right level of participant diversity in your trials. It does however give you access to this data to enable you to be more aware of your current state which might inform future strategy decisions about whether there is a requirement to enrol participants from more diverse backgrounds.

One challenge for many sponsors is that they are generally working with multiple CRO and tech vendor partners who capture this information in different ways across multiple studies.?This in turn causes a headache in terms of how you make sense of this disparate data in a way that isn’t a huge burden and resource drain to do so.

The participant diversity question is one such question that Cerevel therapeutics used the elluminate data hub platform from eClinical to help answer and you can hear more about how Cerevel were able to quickly report on participant diversity metrics across their entire study portfolio, in this recent webinar. Further use cases that involve access to clinical and operational data are also discussed.