Leveraging AI and Community Health Workers to Boost Trial Access

For our Institute for Value-Based Medicine® event held late last year, cohosted with NYU Langone Health, the evening’s theme was “Enhancing Community Cancer Programs With Academic Excellence Through Strategic Partnerships.” A panelist that evening was Kasey Bond, MPH, executive director of administration, Perlmutter Cancer Center. For part 2 of our interview with Bond, we discuss the contributions of community health workers to increasing clinical trial access and how technology can help to facilitate the process.

Bond oversees Perlmutter’s strategic planning and the operations across the NYU Langone Health network, which includes Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island. To revisit part 1 of our interview, please click here.

This transcript has been lightly edited.

Transcript

How can technology and community health workers be leveraged through collaboration to expand clinical trial access?

That’s a great question, and something that we're very excited about. I think it kind of fits in 2 parts for me. One, the community health workers in general, I think, are an extremely important part to expanding access for clinical trials. Clinical trials in certain communities have a certain stigma associated with them, and some patients are extremely nervous about participating or might not even know to ask about a clinical trial as an option. So educating our community health workers to explain to patients what a clinical trial means, how it might benefit them, I think is so, so valuable.

A lot of times the clinical trial is the best possible available treatment course for this patient. And we want to make sure that they have a space to ask questions without the fear of somebody judging them. Even ourselves, we work in the industry and sometimes you feel embarrassed to ask a question in front of a physician. You don't want them to think you don't know what you're talking about. So I think the community health worker is an extremely valuable resource in making patients feel comfortable to ask about their treatment options.

And then when you couple that incredible workforce with technology—AI [artificial intelligence] screening is a great example that we talked about at the event—that can help us to be able to identify patients in advance who might be appropriate for a particular trial. That screening process is extremely cumbersome when done manually, and AI seems like a promising solution to be able to identify patients earlier and easier.

And then when we can connect our community health workers with those patients who are likely eligible, it really brings together a sort of higher success rate in identifying patients who are appropriate for trials and could really benefit from them.

I think it's important for people to hear it from a member of their own community. I think that it's easy to believe that a physician or a nurse or anybody at a hospital or a practice might have a vested interest in why they want you to participate in a study, and so I think the community health worker in this way really serves as kind of a trusted third party. There's no vested interest for them; their only intention is to provide the patient with the most meaningful and useful information for their specific case.

I also think that there's fear in a lot of communities about the fact that there is so little minority representation in many clinical trial accruals that the treatments that are developed and ultimately approved from those trials, there's some concern that those trials weren't conducted in populations that look like theirs. This is the highlight of why it's so important for us to offer clinical trials in a wide variety of communities, but it also is contributing to that distrust that we were talking about, rightfully so.

I think having somebody who understands the nuance of that culture, the concerns of that culture, really is a beneficial way to make patients feel more educated and empowered to make their own decision.