Health Equity Requires Pharmaceutical Company and Community Healthcare Provider Collaboration

Achievement of health equity to ensure that everyone has equal access to the highest level of healthcare has emerged as a top global priority. As part of this effort, health authorities, healthcare providers, healthcare professional societies and pharmaceutical companies recognize that participation in clinical trials is an important piece of the health equity continuum. Historically, clinical trials have been conducted at large academic centers in urban areas where resources, experience and infrastructure to support the trial requirements exist.  However, these academic centers represent only 20% of patients who will ultimately receive the medications because the majority of patients opt to be treated in their communities.

To date, the effort to expand clinical trial enrollment diversity has focused on identifying patients with a particular disease or condition and match them to an appropriate clinical trial. This approach does not consider one of the most critical barriers to clinical trial participation:

The majority of patients outside of urban areas are not able or are not willing to travel great distances to enroll in a clinical trial. Healthcare providers are best positioned to understand their patient population needs.

Bypassing the healthcare provider by directly identifying patients for clinical trials has proven to be unsuccessful. The solution to achieving health equity is to establish relationships and active collaborations with the healthcare professionals who are actively caring for the patients in underserved communities.

Efforts to engage community-based physicians on the topic of offering clinical trials in their practices have been reported. The barriers identified are consistent and include:

☐ Insufficient time to conduct clinical trials

☐ Lack of clinical trial research training or mentorship

☐ Lack of trained support staff to handle regulatory and data requirements.

☐ Lack of infrastructure including equipment and/or research dedicated space

☐ Lack of knowledge about new available clinical trial offerings

All of these identified barriers can be overcome with a concerted effort amongst various stakeholders. Hospital or practice administrators can support their practice in offering research trials; academic-community partnerships can provide needed mentorship; local community colleges can offer clinical research certificate programs; philanthropic programs can provide needed equipment. Golgi is actively working on a solution for ensuring timely knowledge of and access to new clinical trial offerings.

Golgi-CONNECT™ is a new Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud-based, marketplace application which offers a collaboration hub for healthcare providers (HCPs) and pharmaceutical companies. Clinical investigators define specific areas of research interest. Pharmaceutical companies post their clinical trial opportunities. A sophisticated matching algorithm will notify both parties when a match has been made to enable further focused discussion. Golgi is actively recruiting healthcare providers and pharma companies to pilot Golgi-CONNECT™.

Please visit www.golgiconnect.com or contact us at info@golgiconnect.com to learn more.