Parexel and Signify Health Promote Access and Inclusion

Parexel and Signify Health have announced a collaboration aiming to provide customers with solutions to enable access to a more diverse and traditionally underrepresented population for their clinical trials. The partnership will focus on improving patient access to clinical trials, bringing studies to patients in their own homes, and identifying relevant social determinants of health to facilitate connections among local resources, patients, and caregivers.

“Simply saying clinical trial diversity is ‘important’ is not enough,” said Peyton Howell, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial & Strategy Officer for Parexel. “To correct the disparities in healthcare and drive more inclusion in clinical trials, we first must achieve a more holistic understanding of the non-medical factors that influence patient lives.”

According to the World Health Organization, social determinants of health are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life. These determinants include all aspects of a person’s life including socioeconomic status, level of education, housing and employment status, physical environment, social support networks, and access to healthcare. For those considering participating in a clinical trial, issues such as limited availability for assessment tests, limited mobility, and lack of reliable dependent care are examples of the social factors that can make participating in a clinical trial difficult for a patient and the caregiver they rely upon.

Over the coming months, the companies will explore opportunities to address social determinants of health issues as part of the clinical trials recruitment and management processes with the intention of initiating their first pilot program during the first half of 2021.

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