Roundtable Outcomes and Next Steps
Roundtable Takeaways
Roundtable attendees, through small group breakout sessions, suggested possible initiatives SITC could lead that would positively impact diversity in clinical trial enrollment.
Collaboration & Networking
- Hold a convening of sponsors that encourages an exchange of approaches to diversifying enrollment and publish a compilation of approaches for the broader community to access and utilize.
- Build a pilot program that focuses on a region or city and works to establish long-term relationships within the community (churches, barbershops, salons, and check-cashing stores), building trust that ultimately will lead to increased comfort from the community to participate in clinical trials.
Education & Research
- Build content on diversifying clinical trial enrollment into SITC clinician education (e.g. ACIs, certificate program, Winter School, etc.).
- Fund the translation of consent forms into various, diverse languages.
- Explore the epidemiology of various cancers to guide the community to develop RDPs that target the right type of diversity in a particular cancer clinical trial.
- Require SITC abstract submission to include clinical trial diversity data.
Consensus Building
- Work collaboratively with the FDA to outline best practices from submitted RDPs that were successful in diversifying clinical trial enrollment.
- Lobby to bring back COVID-era policies that allowed for cross-state telehealth.
- Create universal forms for consent and order sets.
- Change the expectation for physician time spent educating patients on clinical trials to allow for more dedicated time with patients enrolling in clinical trials.
SITC’s Next Steps
The results of the Roundtable will be shared with the SITC Board of Directors and SITC’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Taskforce. Both the Taskforce and the Board will utilize the recommendations from the Roundtable to set SITC DEI priorities for 2023 and beyond.
Most immediately, the Roundtable organizers recommend that SITC hold a virtual convening in 2023 that ensures the key functionalities within sponsor companies are present. The direct outcome of the 2023 convening will be a manuscript outlining SITC's recommendations for actions each stakeholder in the clinical trial ecosystem can take to positively impact diversity in clinical trial enrollment.