Race/ethnicity matching boosts enrollment of black participants in clinical trials.

Background: Enrollment of a representative sample of racial or ethnic-minority participants can be challenging for researchers conducting clinical trials. One proposed solution is race/ethnicity matching (i.e., aligning the racial or ethnic identity of the trial recruiter with that of the desired participant), but in practice this idea has yielded mixed results. Nevertheless, the approach seems inherently strong, so we reevaluated this strategy in a secondary analysis.

Methods: Black participant enrollment was tracked during the screening phase of two clinical trials led by the same PI and conducted in the same setting: the NICU of a midwestern academic hospital in a predominantly White locale. In the first trial, the recruiter was a White neonatal nurse practitioner from the NICU. In the second trial, the recruiter was a Black research nurse. In this evaluation of race/ethnicity matching, the number of Black women who enrolled into the screening phase of the two trials was compared.

Results: The Black research nurse enrolled twice as many Black participants into the screening phase of a clinical trial compared to the White NICU neonatal nurse practitioner (12.24% & 6.1%, respectively). The 6.14 percentage-point difference in Black participant enrollment is significant using Fisher's exact test (p = 0.035).

Conclusions: The key finding is that the Black recruiter enrolled a significantly greater number of Black participants than the White recruiter, suggesting that race/ethnicity matching is a viable strategy for increasing racial/ethnic minority participation in clinical studies.