Christina Barrington on the Benefit of RWE for Subpopulations and Diverse Populations

The benefit of real-world evidence is that it provides more data on subpopulations and diverse populations, said Christina Barrington, vice president of pharmacy programs at Priority Health.

Transcript

The use of real-world evidence has been seen as a way to rapidly expand indications for existing therapies without the cost of a new phase 3 trial. What are the pros and cons of this approach?

So, I think when you look at it from the perspective of a health plan, the research, the real-world evidence, provides potential future impacts when it comes to clinical decision making, such as formulary, management, utilization, management, tier placement, etc. While we have also noticed with the real-world evidence that there are perceived barriers, you know, with a timeliness experience with the data, sometimes potential for bias, there's also many perceived benefits that we see. So, it gives us increased data about subpopulations, diverse populations, patient-reported outcomes, health care resource utilization costs, and really helps us formulate our coverage strategy based on the additional data.

With real-world evidence, and its potential for future impact, it informs safety monitoring…also helps with formulary and utilization management, and then, you know, really gives us a better idea of how it's really, for lack of better way of saying it, how it's really working in the patient outside of the study design, right? Well, that's a very controlled environment.

Real-world evidence is viewed as a way to capture data from populations that have traditionally been hard to enroll in clinical trials. Is this a valid approach, or should researchers redouble outreach efforts in communities that are underrepresented in trials?

Well, I think that there's still an opportunity that researchers should reach out and secure those subpopulations or diverse populations for trials. But in many trials, if that's not available, or they don't have the opportunity to do that, then I do think that the real-world evidence does give us insight into those subpopulations and diverse populations. As I mentioned previously, I think that is a benefit of real-world evidence.