BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Reify Health, a leading provider of cloud-based solutions that empower the clinical trial ecosystem, today announced the availability of StudyTeam™ Diversity Reporting, a feature that helps sites and sponsors understand whether or not they are effectively engaging patients from traditionally underrepresented minority communities. The report—offered through Reify Health’s StudyTeam platform—provides a window into the demographics of participants as a study enrolls, guiding sponsors on where and how to take action to improve patient diversity in their clinical trials.
Clinical trials are designed to test the safety and efficacy of a drug or device before it is approved for widespread use. To generate the most representative data, trial participants should reflect the diverse patient population that will eventually use a new treatment. Historically, the industry has failed to engage a number of minority communities in clinical research, with certain populations experiencing significant underrepresentation.
While there has been a groundswell of initiatives aimed at improving diversity in clinical trials, sponsors have traditionally been limited in their ability to understand how a trial’s inclusion and exclusion criteria and protocol design impact people from different demographics through stages in the recruitment process. Are research sites considering patients from diverse backgrounds? If so, are people from traditionally underrepresented demographic groups disproportionately declining to participate for a particular reason? Obtaining quantitative answers to these questions can help the life sciences industry better understand the barriers to engaging more diverse communities in clinical trials. Reify is doing just that.
StudyTeam Diversity Reporting allows organizations to understand where current clinical trial enrollment strategies are failing to guide actions, both at the level of an individual trial and across the entire industry. For example, StudyTeam can now help answer critical questions, such as whether enough minority patients are being identified as candidates; whether sites are able to connect with and pre-screen candidates equally across minority groups; whether certain minority groups experience a higher rate of attrition when moving through enrollment; and where to invest more recruitment resources.
“Improving diversity in clinical trials isn’t a 2021 issue. It’s a 2020s issue. We are taking a long-term view that starts with developing a quantitative understanding of where and why our industry is failing to engage certain communities. That knowledge can inform how we, as an industry, act to make clinical trials more representative of the patient populations we strive to help,” said Ralph Passarella, co-founder and CEO of Reify Health. “The StudyTeam Diversity Report is one step of many steps Reify is taking to contribute to the work of increasing diversity and improving representation in clinical trials. We look forward to ongoing collaboration with our site and sponsor partners on this important effort until we, as an industry, are consistently enrolling trials that represent the patients we all serve.”
To learn more, visit www.reifyhealth.com.
About Reify Health
Reify Health paves the way to faster, predictable, and more accessible clinical trials. Through its business entities, StudyTeam and Care Access, the company provides best-in-class clinical optimization software, with a focus on effective enrollment, and transformative clinical trial infrastructure that delivers research directly to more healthcare providers, communities, and patients wherever they are. Through partnerships with top biopharma companies, leading healthcare organizations, and thousands of research sites worldwide, Reify Health eliminates delays in drug development one trial at a time. To find out how Reify Health makes clinical research better, faster, and more collaborative, visit www.reifyhealth.com.
