Add “Taking medications while Black” to the list of inequities Black patients—and many people of color—experience in America.

The historic disenfranchisement of Black people has affected the way drugs are tested. Studies indicate that a lack of participation from those groups has led to adverse side effects in various racial and ethnic groups (and women) because white men are so often the test subjects. The lack of diversity in clinical trials has been so stark that the US mandated pharmaceutical companies to increase diversity in their clinical trials under the 2023 omnibus spending bill enacted in December 2022.

Ramita Tandon, chief clinical trials officer at Walgreens, told attendees at healthcare conference Aspen Ideas: Health last month that “one out of four have some kind of adverse effect in our Black/Brown populations.” That statistic, she said, influenced Walgreens’s decision to enter the clinical trials business in June 2022.

“As we’re trying to build the right highway into our communities to bring trials close to where they are, we get some basic questions that come to our pharmacy care teams [like] ‘What’s a clinical trial?’” Tandon said. “We’re unlocking our locations to become these healthcare destinations and to become these clinical trial hubs.”

What’s in a trial? Clinical trials are how pharmaceutical companies test whether the drugs they’re developing work. Trials for drugs are done in three phases before the FDA decides whether to approve the drug, and each phase can take years to complete. During each phase, experimental drugs are given to volunteers to test the drug’s safety, dosage, efficacy, and side effects.

Ideally, trial participants are representative of the population that would be taking that drug in the real world if it were to get FDA approval.

Keep reading here.—AE, MA

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Amanda at [email protected]. For completely confidential conversations, ask Amanda for her number on Signal.

What unites clinicians and patients alike, no matter which area of healthcare they’re in? Dedication to better health + the desire for a more human experience.

To dive more deeply into this perspective, GE HealthCare launched an industry study amplifying the POVs of 7.5k clinicians and patients across 8 countries to better understand what their vision for the future of healthcare could look like. That’s a lotta data.

And with it all, GEHC was able to uncover key barriers that need to be overcome to get there.

Here’s a sneak peek: Patient priorities for the future include faster detection, flexibility, and accessible data, and 61% of clinicians believe AI can support clinical decision-making.

See what else was reported—and how healthcare systems can up their resiliency.

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT may not be able to replace physicians, but they may be able to help them make decisions regarding breast cancer screenings and imaging breast pain, according to a new study from researchers at Harvard and Mass General Brigham.

The study, which is one of the first to show that the large language model ChatGPT can support the clinical decision-making process, analyzed the AI tool’s ability to choose the appropriate imaging test for patients with breast pain. Both ChatGPT 3.5 and the more advanced ChatGPT 4 selected the appropriate imaging test the majority of the time, offering the potential to optimize workflows and reduce administrative time, the study found.

“I see [ChatGPT] acting like a bridge between the referring healthcare professional and the expert radiologist—stepping in as a trained consultant to recommend the right imaging test at the point of care, without delay,” study coauthor Marc Succi said in a statement.

The researchers asked both ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 to determine what kind of imaging a patient with breast pain would need—a mammogram, ultrasound, MRI, or other type of imaging test—based on the Appropriateness Criteria from the American College of Radiology (ACR).

These criteria help radiologists choose the best course of action based on a patient’s age and symptoms. For example, a mammogram for a patient in their 30s with clinically significant breast pain would be “usually appropriate” for initial imaging, according to the guidelines.

In 21 fictitious patient scenarios, ChatGPT 3.5 chose the appropriate imaging test an average of 88.9% of the time, while ChatGPT 4 answered 98.4% of the scenarios correctly, on average, the study found.

Keep reading here.—KW

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Kristine at [email protected]. For completely confidential conversations, ask Kristine for her number on Signal.

On Fridays, we schedule our rounds with Healthcare Brew readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Madhavi Vemireddy, co-CEO of Cleo, an online platform designed to support caregivers. Cleo is sold directly to self-insured employers at a price that varies based on the size of the company and the services the employer chooses to offer its workers. Vemireddy talked about how Cleo works, the problem it’s trying to solve, and why she believes a “family-centered” healthcare model is essential.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What is Cleo, and what problem is it trying to solve?

The problem is that we don’t have a family-centered care model in our healthcare system. Cleo provides family support across all stages of life, starting with people who are planning to start a family of their own, to those that are pregnant, to those with children, and those that are supporting an adult loved one. Many families are going through multiple of these life stages all at once, and our goal is to provide a platform that supports all families with their parenting journey, caregiving journey, and their own planning-for-parenthood journey.

We sell to self-insured employers, and what they’re looking at is how can they attract and retain talent, and how can they improve productivity in the workplace, knowing how much of an impact caregiving and parenting has on employees day to day. We have more than 180 employers today, and we’re in about 15 countries.

How does Cleo work?

The first step is downloading our app. When you complete the enrollment process in the app, you’re telling us what your family profile looks like and what the needs are of everyone in your family.

Keep reading here.—MA

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Maia at [email protected]. For completely confidential conversations, ask Maia for her number on Signal.

Today’s top healthcare reads.

Stat: About 10% of people in the US will develop a kidney stone in their lifetime, but more teenage girls are developing them. (NBC News)

Quote: “The overdose crisis is incredibly complex, and it demands more than just money. We also need the right people in charge of that money.”—Rollie Martinson, a policy associate at the nonprofit Community Education Group, on opioid settlement dollar tracking (KFF Health News)

Read: PBM ads are flooding the TV market. (KFF Health News)