Improving Health Equity Through More Representative Clinical Trials

Patients from marginalized or rural populations often have less access to clinical trials or distrust based on a long-standing history of medical exploitation. However, this disparity in patient populations is detrimental to health equity efforts, biasing research by skewing heavily toward primarily white, upper-middle class, urban participant populations.

According to Christine Bahls, “Some sponsors are trying a new method to ensure they have underrepresented populations in their trials. Instead of warm bodies, they are pursuing digitized bodies, those patients whose health information lives in prior clinical trials, EHRs, claims data, prescriptions, urgent care locations, and so on. They are turning to data companies to create their control arms by finding digitized patients to match real ones in the treatment arm.”

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(Source: Applied Clinical Trials, March 6^th, 2023)