Making Equity and Trial Diversity Real

Over the course of the last three years, ConcertAI has advanced numerous perspectives and programs in the area of Health Equity and Trial Diversity. This has included the formation of an outside luminary advisory board; establishing grants and data access for first-time academic researchers; sponsoring webinars with biopharma and academic leaders in the field; creating a health equity registry with ASCO; forming large scale initiatives at the state level with the National Cancer Institute NCORP program in Louisiana; and publishing multiple times at ASH, ASCO, and other key forums. We have the privilege of accessing the largest collection of research-grade oncology data in the world, and work with leading provider and medical society partners and committed biopharma sponsors to assure that we are not perpetuating historical biases and proactively working to eliminate them.

Over the last three years, we have worked to change how we do everything in fulfillment of these responsibilities. We are now pleased to announce that, in 2023, every one of our real-world data and AI SaaS solutions has been advanced to the next version where health equity and trial diversity strategies, analyses, and programs can be deployed 100% of the time – not as an option or a project, but as part of a unified system of elements that have been defined to change how research is done, allow the research disparities that underlie health inequities to be eliminated, and to support healthcare provider and biopharma innovator programs that assure insights, access, and the broadest representativeness. We see this as an ethical imperative, a solemn responsibility, and foundational to any business committed to patients.

What does this mean in practice? All ConcertAI RWD solutions are now a composite of EMR, medical claims, and social determinants of health (SDoH) derived data.  It’s not an option to receive any data solutions without these elements. We are publishing new data dictionaries that include these fields, producing analytic support tools for a broader set of researchers, and offering all current RWD-users the ability to update their datasets to include our new version. Therefore, any user of our data solutions will be able to glean insights about all affected populations regardless of race, ethnicity, economic status, geography, or any other attribute.

Clinical Trial Optimization (CTO) and Digital Trial Solutions (DTS), we are advancing the same. CTO 2.0 now has fully integrated SDoH and medical claims data that allow the definition of a Trial Diversity strategy, design of a study that explicitly is inclusive of specific subpopulations, and identification of sites capable of ensuring the ultimate study population is, in fact, diverse and representative of the population receiving the therapeutic. Similarly, DTS is  deployed to the community in assurance that all individuals, in all regions, have access to leading clinical trials. Our research indicates access and assurance of local support are key drivers of trial participation. At the same time, study sponsors need to know new sites that are not part of their legacy site network  allow them access to more diverse populations and meet the emerging FDA of more diverse and representative populations. So, all of our AI SaaS solutions assure insights and actions for health equity and trial diversity, all the time.

Our commercial solutions are adopting the same. Access and ability to pay are often limitations for patients to initiate treatment, especially for specialty therapeutics. We now have predictive tools to determine these barriers and are providing a view of the efficiency and equity of access and populations who could be beneficiaries but are unable to initiate and sustain treatment.

Health equity and trial diversity are a collective responsibility. You can’t be a healthcare provider in the time of value-based care; a biopharma innovator with trial diversity imperative; or a health data and SaaS solutions company creating the ‘operating infrastructure & systems’ of biomedical innovation without accepting this responsibility and making it integral to your operating model and key performance measures. We are 100% committed to this, making it integral to everything we do and every RWD and SaaS innovation we bring to market.