New Screening Tool Helps Identify Barriers to Patients Joining Clinical Trials

March 2, 2021

Increasing patient enrollment to clinical trials continues to be challenging despite efforts to identify multiple physician, patient, and system barriers. One way to alleviate this problem is to expand demographic and comorbidity data collection. This additional information can then enhance our understanding of the barriers, develop interventions to overcome them, and recognize their impact on treatment results.

A new article in American Cancer Society Journals, Use of a Clinical Trial Screening Tool to Enhance Patient Accrual, details how a clinical trial screening tool was developed to collect expanded demographic data and barriers to trial enrollment. This tool has been implemented in the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Clinical Oncology Research Program (NCORP). Westat, which supports the Cancer Trials Support Unit (CTSU), provided the technical and implementation support necessary to make the screening tool accessible to the NCORP network of sites.