Abbott's takeaways on boosting clinical trial diversity

Abbott's Jennifer Jones-McMeans outlines how finding community champions and creating digital tools can help boost diversity in clinical trials.

Harvard Business Review reports that people of color make up about 2%-16% of patients in clinical trials but 39% of the U.S. population. In this study, Abbott teamed up with community partners and helped train new clinicians on conducting clinical trials. To help expand this physician group, Jones-McMeans said that Abbott is investing in historically Black colleges and universities' medical schools, as well as investing in training more physicians to conduct clinical trials. To remedy this, Abbott created a patient-facing platform, where participants and their families could access additional information about the clinical trial and their condition. We want them to understand their disease as a patient, and then let me explain to you why we are doing this clinical trial."