Health IT, Hospitals

Building an app for clinical trial participants? Note these common misconceptions people have

Connecting patients with clinical trials that they’re eligible for, and keeping them engaged once they […]

Connecting patients with clinical trials that they’re eligible for, and keeping them engaged once they enroll, has sparked many a digital health company.

And for good reason: Clinical trials cost pharmaceutical companies millions of dollars and get even more expensive and time-consuming when patients drop out.

If you’re building a product that involves getting more people involved in clinical trials, this blog post over at the Cleveland Clinic’s Health Hub might provide some useful guidance. In the post, the research program manager for solid tumor oncology at the clinic and his team dispel the 10 most common myths they hear about cancer clinical trials.

It’s easy to see how these ideas could deter people from participating in trials. Developers and entrepreneurs working in this area may want to address some of these beliefs when building their products:

  • People worry they’ll be treated like guinea pigs and don’t stand to benefit from trials. A few different studies have found that patients generally feel valued and respected by investigators. In fact, in one survey, 85 percent of respondents said they felt they’d received even better care than normal because they’d participated in a trial.
  • Some see clinical trials as a last resort for people with no other treatment options. That’s true in some cases, but there are also prevention trials, diagnostic trials and quality-of-life trials for healthy volunteers and people newly diagnosed with a condition.
  • Some people think they will be given sugar pills instead of treatment. Sugar pills are rarely even used in clinical trials, according to Beaver. In late-stage, comparative trials, patients are given the best known treatment for a given cancer.

The rest of the list is here.

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