IPG Health Launches Industry’s First Clinical Trial Diversity Offering
Building on its long-standing commitment to advancing health equity, and specifically clinical equality, IPG Health formally launched an industry-first offering designed to help pharma and healthcare companies diversify their clinical trials and ensure more inclusive treatment innovations. The new offering is a multidisciplinary approach that ensures equitable representation across various dimensions of diversity - from race to gender, age, and other intersectional groups -throughout the clinical trial process.
Drawing from IPG Health’s deep medical and engagement strategy, data analytics, software intelligence, and patient experience expertise, the end-to-end offering addresses barriers to inclusion across clinical trial outreach, recruitment, and engagement. This includes everything from understanding patients’ behaviours and predicting their health intentions, to crafting measurable engagement strategies, developing clinical trial support systems, and more.
“Too often various communities and populations are underrepresented in clinical trials, even when their lives are at stake. Take type 2 diabetes, for example - only 4% of type 2 diabetes clinical trial participants are Black, yet Black Americans are more likely to experience diabetes complications than White Americans. And in all clinical trials, less than 1% of participants are Native American, even though Native Americans are more likely than White Americans to experience diseases such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, coronary heart disease, and liver cancer,” said Sommer Bazuro, IPG Health’s chief medical officer. “And that’s just looking at disparities along racial lines for only two groups. Excluding any population from clinical trials means sidelining millions of people for new treatments that could improve their health outcomes and potentially save their lives.”
IPG Health has long advocated for diversity in clinical trials, notably with its award-winning 'The Trial for #ClinicalEquality' campaign, which, for over three years now, has galvanised cross-sector stakeholders - from physicians, pharma companies, and advocacy groups to influential tech companies and academic institutions - to help raise awareness and spur innovation that effects change.
“We are relentlessly focused on doing what’s right for our clients, their brands, and our people. And we can’t do what’s right unless equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) are at the heart of our business,” said IPG Health CEO, Dana Maiman. “This important offering is just another way that we continue to hold ourselves accountable for advancing health equity and being trusted partners to our clients. This clinical trial diversity offering is a pivotal move in helping clients unlock new opportunities and address significant unmet needs in underserved populations and, ultimately, helping to accelerate equity in healthcare.”
Sommer added: “Helping companies produce truly inclusive clinical trials and outcomes requires a deep understanding of the innate complexities of the clinical trial process and the multifactorial barriers within it. That’s something very few health marketing agencies possess. At IPG Health, we’ve invested years into understanding those complexities and variables, and identifying actionable opportunities. And we do it in partnership with leading tech and pharma companies, advocacy organisations, and academic institutions across the full clinical trial spectrum - from the supply and demand ends to the crucial intermediaries in between. All of this demands a depth of medical and scientific expertise, creativity, and specialised capabilities that only IPG Health is uniquely able to provide.”
The new offering is an extension of IPG Health’s EDI+You strategy, which includes 'inQ' (Inclusion Intelligence Quotient) - a proprietary integrated strategic framework designed to ensure even more inclusive experiences and creative solutions across the network’s 45+ agencies. Rooted in an evidence-based framework inspired by the World Health Organization’s Determinants of Health model, IPG Health’s inQ focuses on understanding how multiple factors and influences impact exclusion or inclusion of people so that no populations are left behind.
