The barriers we are addressing are lack of awareness, misconceptions, and attitudes towards clinical trials. They exist, simply because the patient is unaware or misunderstands clinical trial options. These barriers are difficult to surmount, however, by building upon existing infrastructures, we may be able to reach and educate more people. Patients’ misconceptions regarding clinical trials, placebos, experimental testing, and cost prevent cancer patients from participating in clinical trials.
The National Cancer Institute’s Oncology Cancer Trial Accrual Symposium discusses the challenges for clinical trial accrual where a best practice found is to simplify the consent forms.
The ASCO's "Enhancing Clinical Trial Awareness and Outreach" mentions the importance of raising community awareness and involvement, which is our proposed solution core idea.
Sandra Williams’ summary of literature discusses attitudes, barriers, and motivating factors regarding clinical trials a decade ago (2004), most of which are the same barriers that we face today in clinical trials.
Specific outreach can be time consuming and in some smaller congregations, the outreach may not yield any new patients. However, by targeting specific, densely populated areas, we are likely to reach enough people that would be candidates for clinical trials. Over time, the program will be able to reach the smaller congregations and places away from clinical trial sites.
We anticipate 160,000 people who will be diagnosed with cancer every year that will be interested in enrolling in a clinical trial patient based on our solution. Please see the proposal for sources and how we derived this number. This can be proven by doing a pilot program in an urban area. The Mayo Clinic Pilot Program has also shown a similar method to be successful. It may take a couple years to ramp up to this number, which does not account for patients that are currently diagnosed with cancer. The flexibility of the program allows us to choose strategically where to focus and target certain locations in the US.
Continued expansion outward from clinical trial locations will help bring in more people. If we can build the trust with these communities, they will continue to support our program. Additional services such as onsite seminars, education, and continual updates will also maintain the percent increase.
Outreach done by non-profit organizations will be unlikely to run into any legal hurdles given the nature of the solution. It may be best to keep separation of church and state in mind while implementing the proposal.
This solution has been shown to work well in a small scale study, specifically targeting a certain group. However this have never been tried on a larger scale.
