Feb 23, 2022

Feb 23, 2022 7:20am "My hope is it's a door that's been opened, that's been removed and can no longer be closed again," said Kevin Beckford, senior vice president and chief people and compliance officer at GRYT Health. (GRYT Health) GRYT Health and Bristol Myers Squibb are doubling down on their four-part series Diversity in Oncology 's interactive sessions with the third session, “Improving Representation of Diversity in Clinical Trials Through Academia and Community Collaboration.” While there’s been a lot of discussion around the subject of diversity in clinical trials, progress is slow. Part of the problem is dealing with issues in the past with clinical trials and communities of color—understandably, there’s been some resistance. The goal of the event is for academic researchers to talk about the steps they are taking to try to rebuild trust and engage these communities to increase diversity in clinical trials that will lead to better outcomes. In the wake of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement, people and pharma have been shown a stark picture of some of the inequalities in care. In response, there has been a concerted push to address fixing these issues. “It feels to me that all stakeholders at the table are trained to ask that basic question: ‘How do we allow this to exist for so long, and what can we do to fix it?’” Kevin Beckford, senior vice president and chief people and compliance officer at GRYT Health, said. “So my hope is it's a door that's been opened, that's been removed and can no longer be closed again. Because in the long run, what we discovered in the pandemic is that social and healthcare inequities affects everyone.”