INFOSHEET 02: Improving diversity in your patient recruitment strategy

As ethnic and religious minorities remain under-represented in clinical studies globally, and enrolment remains your biggest challenge, the connection between the two shouldn’t go unnoticed.

Barriers to recruitment can be economic, linguistic, cultural, religious or physical. And in many cases, patients are referred by doctors or medical centres, which have a higher percentage of certain demographics than others. But with regulatory bodies around the world increasingly asking for evidence of drug safety and effectiveness in diverse populations, it’s vital to address these barriers in your clinical study design.

How a lack of diversity affects outcomes

Differences between people, such as:

• age
• gender
• weight
• ethnicity
• geographical location

can affect clinical outcomes. Different groups may need alternative drug dosages, experience completely different results, and have distinctive side effects. Without a diverse participant pool, these metrics can’t be fully explored, meaning outcomes will be unknown.

Widen your participant pool to improve enrolment targets

Improving diversity in clinical studies brings huge benefits. For research companies, facilitating minority patients to enrol on your study means you’ll have a much broader patient pool to recruit participants from.

Help improve health equity and safety

By enrolling minority patients in your studies, you can improve the likelihood that they’ll benefit from the research. The results of the studies will be relevant to more segments of the population, and can help improve access to healthcare services generally, meaning better health equity for everybody. Plus, medical products are safer and more effective for a wider population when clinical research includes diverse populations.

How to design a diverse and inclusive clinical study

Developing relationships with patient advocacy groups is vital to the success of any clinical study. If your study needs to reach an established patient group, or a minority population, then you’ve got to engage community leaders, patient advocates, and key opinion leaders throughout the development process. By developing these relationships with your target population, your study will be welcomed and trusted.

At COUCH Health, we champion the need to improve diversity in clinical studies. Firstly, because we believe that there’s no excuse that this remains an issue in today’s modern world. And secondly, because clinical studies that enrol racially and ethnically diverse patients supports an increase in safe drugs for a representative patient population.

If you’d like to hear more about what we do, or would like to discuss how we could improve diversity and inclusion in your clinical studies, contact us here.