Patients Could Benefit From Payers Being Introduced Into Clinical Trials Earlier

Doug Fulling, MA, president of Precision AQ, and Andrew Cournoyer, MBA, senior vice president and director of the access experience team, Precision AQ, spoke with The American Journal of Managed Care^® about how introducing payers into clinical spaces earlier could benefit their patients.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Transcript

How can patients benefit from payers being introduced into clinical trials earlier?

Doug Fulling: One of the big focuses in clinical research is to diversify the patient populations that actually participate in clinical research. And if you think about payers, they have access and exposure to those diverse patient populations. So by working closely with them during the clinical trial, we have the ability to focus on making sure that there's a true representation of the US population, for those clinical trials through payers who can identify diverse patient populations. So that's number 1.

Number 2, is not everybody has access to a clinical trial. There are limitations on where research is done, and we believe that payers can be the missing link in connecting patients who might be eligible to facilities that are actually running these clinical trials. There's a big gap in how many people actually have the opportunity to participate.

Those are where there's opportunities for patients. It's really in diversifying the clinical research and giving those populations that wouldn't necessarily have accessibility to those trials and then also just broadening the education and the awareness of clinical trials that are taking place in the market.

Andrew Cournoyer: On that education front, there might be one other thing that payers have an opportunity to support, because they have a large team of case management or case managers, or they are individuals who are making direct patient contact or out in the field. When it comes to a clinical trial, there's a lot of stigma associated with them that's kind of a treatment of last resort. And that's not usually the case, actually. It's getting someone involved earlier, like we were saying earlier, may actually drive a better outcome quicker soonere and then ultimately a better quality of life for that patient.

I think payers are in a unique position to help educate their members or patients, if you will, about the benefits of clinical trials to help remove some of the stigmas in the adoption. There are certainly a number of health disparities and social determinants of health that are negatively impacting the certain trust factors that go into patients entering into trials. And that might also be an opportunity for payers who have, in some cases, very broad reach to reach out and help remove some of those barriers.