Building Clinical Trial Infrastructure Inside Pharmacies

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Ramita Tandon, chief biopharma officer, Walgreens, discussed the company’s three-year milestone of leading clinical trials. Tandon highlighted several of Walgreens’ initiatives in the space, including how its 8,000+ pharmacy locations are bringing research directly into communities. She emphasized the need for community-based partnerships, cultural competence, and education to empower patients. Looking forward, strategic partnerships will be key in enhancing inclusivity and accessibility, with the ultimate goal of bridging gaps in clinical research and public health.

ACT: Community-based access is at the core of Walgreens’ model. From an operational standpoint, what’s involved in setting up clinical trial infrastructure in a non-traditional site like a pharmacy?

Tandon: That's a great question. If we can step back here, obviously, Walgreens has been in the communities well over 120 years, so we are a pillar in the communities across the nation. We continue to provide our services, whether it's dispensing medications or healthcare services that are meant to help support looking to solve care gaps and removing barriers for patients to gain access to novel therapies, we're leveraging our assets in a way. Our trusted relationships that the pharmacists and the pharmacy care teams have with their patients, it allows us to leverage our assets in a way to create more of the model that I described earlier, so that we create pathways of bringing clinical research into the communities, but to make it more accessible and equitable and then ensuring that patients have a seamless experience for when they participate, because Andy, many of the patients that are joining our clinical trials, it's the first time for them, and oftentimes, there's been a lot of fear and just mistrust along the way, so there's a constant need to be able to educate and empower the patients to be able to make those decisions and feel comfortable to wanting to participate, so activating our full capabilities and assets within the pharmacy ecosystem has been very pivotal for us to be able to bring clinical research into the communities.

Now, certainly, there's a lot of investments in training our pharmacists who are supporting our clinical research. We have a dedicated clinical research team and trialists that are focused in executing these trials, but a big part of activating our Walgreens assets is our pharmacists. Our pharmacists are the ones that have the trusted relationships with the patient population and the communities. We're activating our frontline workers, and ultimately they're helping us to educate and drive awareness of why clinical research is absolutely critical for their own benefits, but also part of their care journey, because one of the things that are more important for us is to be changing that narrative that clinical trials is not nuanced as a laboratory exercise, but rather a care option, particularly when standard of care is not a viable option.

Our access to over 130 million patients and the daily interactions that we have—nearly I think 9 million patients that come into our stores and pharmacies every single day—puts us in a very unique position, because we have that direct access, we have that trust, so it allows us to leverage that patient population, to be able to engage and recruit them into our trials, and certainly the access to our data insights. We have a treasure trove of insights around our patients, whether they're coming into our store to purchase different products, or whether it's to pick up their prescriptions through our pharmacies, the amount of insights that we have, both quantitative and qualitative, allows us to really be more effective and efficient in how we identify those patient populations, match those patients to trials, but then also recruit them, because we know that simply just sending out messages for patients to want to enroll is not enough. That requires a lot of that community surround sound, but also understand who those patients are, how they want to engage. We have populations in our rural parts of America that prefer mailers. They actually prefer snail mail versus the electronic means of texting or emailing. We also engage our patients through phone calls, so those insights allow us to help us understand who the patient population is, engage them, so we can get those patients to respond, and then have the ability to participate in our trials.

Now, the patient referrals have been an integral part of our success over the last three years. Our Walgreens patient referrals are about 20% more likely to enroll in a study compared to other referrals, while increasing the participation of rates across more of a diverse patient population.