It is essential that the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in prostate cancer clinical trials be addressed, in order to improve health disparities seen amongst these racial/ethnic minority patient populations. This study suggests that population-based cancer registries could be used as a source for the recruitment in minority patients in order to overcome problems with inclusion of diverse patient populations in clinical trial research.
In January of 2019 the Assembly Bill (AB2325) went into effect in the state of California. This bill mandated the electronic reporting of structured data elements to the California Cancer Registry (CCR) from pathologists diagnosing cancer in patients. Using information electronically gathered from CCR the investigators of the study employed ECA or “rapid case ascertainment” to screen through pathology reports from cancer patient diagnosis.
The research group’s goal for this study was to demonstrate that leveraging structured electronic pathology or e-path data reporting to a population-based cancer registry for the recruitment of men with high risk prostate cancer to clinical research, would prove feasible and acceptable. This was a nonrandomized study among patients with new pathologic diagnosis of high-risk prostate cancer. This study tested the utility of an online clinical trial matching tool called Trial Library; an internet-based clinical trial matching website used in combination with e-path to improve matching of underrepresented prostate cancer patients into clinical trials at time of diagnosis.
They were successful in demonstrating that e-path could be linked with an online clinical trial matching tool such as Trial Library. The researchers state that future studies should prioritize recruitment from reporting facilities that serve more racially/ethnically diverse patient populations in order to bring about improvements in cancer clinical trial disparities.
