Disparities in Access to Oncology Clinical Trials

Leonard Kalman, MD, the executive deputy direction, and chief medical officer at Miami Cancer Institute, explains the disparities in clinical trial enrollment, which include access to care, lack of education, and low cancer screening rates.

Kalman says that community cancer centers may be able to improve on the disparities by embedding oncologists in underserved communities. Kalman believes this strategy may lead to more patients enrolling into clinical trials and more clinical trials be developed based on the population of patients being seen in the community setting.

0:08 |There is a great disparity in clinical trial enrollment, and certain many underserved populations do not have any exposure to clinical trials at all. Also, very often, clinical trials are the best option for a patient. So, there's a great deal of work to be done to identify those populations, get in, educate them, screen them, and also make treatment options available even in the underserved area itself.

0:52 | [By] using navigators that are from the underserved area, so the patient is comfortable. And of course, involving a lot of community organizers and local people is important, so that the community that's underserved, feels that the institute that offers clinical trials is coming to them, and working with them in their neighborhood and not always pulling them out to our institution. When a patient enrolls in the trial, they will have to see a physician or institution, but physicians have to embed themselves in the underserved are, to prove their credibility and ultimately. And obviously, the more patients you see, there are more options for clinical trial enrollment.