America Living With AIDS

AMERICA Living

RECOMMENDATIONS
1. Current efforts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to expand the recruitment of underrepresented populations in the AIDS Clinical Trials Group
should be continued and increased.
While the Commission recognizes that lack of access to health care seriously
hampers efforts to recruit underrepresented people into clinical trials, this does
not mean it is impossible to do so. NIH has begun to increase participation and
should aggressively pursue the participation of women and people of color in
their clinical trials.
2. The Secretary of Health and Human Services should direct the National Institutes of Health, the Health Care Financing Administration, and the Health
Resources and Services Administration to work together to develop a series of
recommendations to address the obstacles that keep many people from participating in HIV-related clinical trials, as well as the variables that force some people to seek participation in trials because they have no other health care
options.
3. The Food and Drug Administration should aggressively pursue all options for
permitting the early use of promising new therapies for conditions for which
there is no standard therapy or for patients who have failed or are intolerant of
standard therapy.
4. The National Institutes of Health should develop a formal mechanism for disseminating state-of-the-art treatment information in an expeditious and farreaching manner.
While the Commission is aware of the efforts at NIH to disseminate information
about state-of-the-art HIV treatment, the Commission is also aware that many
health care providers are still not getting the information they need to responsibly care for their patients with HIV disease. The Commission believes NIH
needs to develop a more formalized mechanism for disseminating information
in a timely and ongoing fashion and should work with the federally funded AIDS
Education and Training Centers, as well as professional medical societies, to
reach as many people as possible.
5. The Department of Health and Human Services should conduct a study to
determine the policies of third-party payers regarding the payments of certain
health service costs that are provided as part of an individual's participation in
clinical trials conducted in the development of HIV-related drugs.

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