OneStudyTeam Announces Diversity Reporting Capabilities to Help Sponsors and Sites Better Understand Challenges to Diversifying Clinical Trials

Boston, November 18, 2021 — OneStudyTeam, a leading provider of cloud-based solutions that empower the clinical trial ecosystem, today announced the availability of diversity insights within the StudyTeam® platform to help sites and sponsors understand whether or not they are effectively engaging patients from traditionally underrepresented minority communities. The insights provide a window into the demographics of participants as a study enrolls, guiding sponsors on where and how to take action to improve patient diversity in their clinical trials.

Clinical trials are designed to test the safety and efficacy of a therapy or device before it is approved for widespread use. To generate the most representative data, trial participants should reflect the diverse patient population that will eventually use a new treatment. Historically, the industry has failed to engage a number of minority communities in clinical research, with certain populations experiencing significant underrepresentation.

While there has been a groundswell of initiatives aimed at improving diversity in clinical trials, sponsors have traditionally been limited in their ability to understand how a trial’s inclusion and exclusion criteria and protocol design impact people from different demographics through stages in the recruitment process. Are research sites considering patients from diverse backgrounds? If so, are people from traditionally underrepresented demographic groups disproportionately declining to participate for a particular reason? Obtaining quantitative answers to these questions can help the life sciences industry better understand the barriers to engaging more diverse communities in clinical trials. OneStudyTeam is doing just that. 

StudyTeam's diversity insights allow organizations to understand where current clinical trial enrollment strategies are failing to guide actions, both at the level of an individual trial and across the entire industry. For example, StudyTeam can now help answer critical questions, such as whether enough minority patients are being identified as candidates; whether sites are able to connect with and pre-screen candidates equally across minority groups; whether certain minority groups experience a higher rate of attrition when moving through enrollment; and where to invest more recruitment resources.

“Improving diversity in clinical trials isn’t a 2021 issue – it’s a 2020s issue,” said Ralph Passarella, co-founder and CEO of OneStudyTeam. "We are taking a long-term view that starts with developing a quantitative understanding of where and why our industry is failing to engage certain communities. That knowledge can inform how we as an industry act to make clinical trials more representative of the patient populations we strive to help. Building diversity reporting capabilities into StudyTeam is one step of many steps we are taking to contribute to the work of increasing diversity and improving representation in clinical trials. We look forward to ongoing collaboration with our site and sponsor partners on this important effort until we, as an industry, are consistently enrolling trials that represent the patients we all serve.”

About OneStudyTeam

OneStudyTeam, a member of the Reify Health portfolio, provides the cloud-based platform StudyTeam to accelerate the development of new and life-saving therapies. StudyTeam brings research site workflows online and enables sites, sponsors, and other key stakeholders to work together more effectively using common technology. The suite of StudyTeam solutions reduces site burden and helps sites pre-screen and enroll more patients, provides sponsors with end-to-end visibility into recruitment activity across all channels, and guides sites in conducting the trial for patients who have been enrolled. StudyTeam is trusted by the largest global biopharmaceutical companies, used in more than 6,000 research sites, and is available in over 100 countries.