Community Collaboration Key to Inclusive Clinical Trial Design: Amir Fathi, MD

Community collaboration is just as essential as a tailored clinical trial design to best investigate the effects of a disease on a specific patient population, Amir Fathi, MD, director of the leukemia program at Massachusetts General Hospital, said in an interview with The American Journal of Managed Care®.

Given the significant number of protocols necessary to conduct a clinical trial, Fathi explained that the “copy and paste” method often excludes patients who are unable to travel to the testing site. Yet these are the exact patients who should be included, given their socioeconomic status or patient demographics that categorize them as underserved populations.

“A patient has to show up and take tests or do laboratory work or present for evaluations and physical exams, some of which may not be necessary, particularly for patient populations for whom it's difficult to travel or difficult to come to the clinic for a variety of reasons,” Fathi explained.

During his panel discussion titled “From Vision to Reality: Building Diversity in Clinical Trials” at the recent Boston regional Institute for Value-Based Medicine® evening, Fathi emphasized the need for collaboration between community health systems and large academic centers to prioritize representation in clinical trials.

“I think every large academic center has catchment areas, or community settings, which refer patients to them,” he said. “[And], I think close collaboration, communication, and interaction are very important.”

During the panel discussion, Fathi noted the shift in health care from intensive inpatient treatments to more outpatient care, which may also present as a barrier to access for underserved communities and patients.

“Because patients have to come to the clinic more often. They have to know how to get to the clinic. They have to understand directions, so health literacy, language barriers, and all of those things are going to be impacted,” Fathi said during the panel discussion.