This year’s MassBio Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Conference will shine a light on health equity. Panelists will explore how clinical trial diversity is a meaningful and achievable step toward the equitable delivery of health care, while keynote speakers will speak to personal experience with institutional efforts to usher in change and work to earn patients’ trust.
Featured keynotes:
- From charity to equity: Trina Martin Cherry, vice president of sales, marketing, and community outreach at Boston Medical Center (BMC), will set the stage for the conference by speaking to the example BMC has set when they pivoted from charity to health equity during COVID-19 and in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
- Building trust: Crysta Dungee, head of DEI at Takeda, will speak to efforts to make inroads into historically underserved populations that have experienced health disparities by closing the trust gap between health systems and underserved communities.
Achieving clinical trial diversity: The life sciences industry has a patient-driven responsibility to tackle the significant and persistent injustices, obstacles, and disparities that have created health inequality. With more than 6,000 clinical trials going on in Massachusetts at any given time, the state can play a leadership role in promoting diversity throughout the drug development process.
- A panel of experts will focus on best practices for diversity in clinical trials, common missteps, and how to avoid them, and creating a roadmap to success with tangible steps to take to increase diversity in clinical trials.
Workshopping clinical trial diversity: GenUnity’s Gina Morales-Taveras will facilitate an interactive workshop that will encourage participants to take what they have learned from the panel and other speakers to make the clinical trials in the provided cancer and cardiology case studies more diverse.
- This is an opportunity for participants to apply best practices, ask questions, collaborate, and maximize the practical takeaways from the conference.
Delivering on supplier diversity: How does Thermo Fisher Scientific find new diverse suppliers? What does the inclusive onboarding process look like? How does Fisher work with their diverse supplier programs? Get these questions and more answered by Heather Vono, Senior Program Director, Supplier Diversity at Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Networking with others in the DEI and HR spaces: There will be ample time for participants to expand their networks, share personal experiences, and build the relationships that will lead to progress toward mutual DEI goals.