By Deborah Borfitz 

March 12, 2025 | Jumo Health launched a suite of services to drive health equity in clinical trials in 2023 via a collaboration with I Choose Life Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to addressing health disparities in the African American community. It helped the company pilot its first community engagement event in the form of a workshop to train local business and faith leaders to serve as trusted messengers of information about clinical research and the point-of-care experience, says Kristin Tolbert, the company’s associate vice president of health equity strategy. 

That approach and network expanded last year after Tolbert was hired to scale the company’s health equity offerings. Jumo Health adopted a more comprehensive, omni-channel strategy that seeks to curate the right set of core tactics best meeting a study’s needs while “pushing the industry to think bigger about inclusive research,” she says. 

Diversity has become a “trigger word” due partly to its false association with race and ethnicity, she notes, since representation in clinical research lags for many different population groups. Both healthcare providers and site teams need to be better equipped to answer patients’ questions to support their successful journey through trials and do it with greater compassion and cultural awareness. 

Typically, Jumo Health works with the study teams of sponsor companies and contract research organizations (CROs) looking to either improve the representation of certain groups in ongoing trials or to partner with them on the front end when they’re launching a study for a new medication, says Tolbert. The company has also done a little work with sites directly. 

“We have been seeing more sponsors investing in general [clinical trial] awareness,” Tolbert adds. “We recommend that more macro engagement versus just jumping into a community... [to promote] a specific clinical trial because that doesn’t work.” The focus needs to be on building trust and education about the study process.  

Jumo Health has separately been working with some big-box retailers and is exploring the idea of fostering more such partnerships, particularly in communities that are under-insured or have access barriers at traditional doctors’ offices, says Tolbert. These collaborators include pharmacies, which are “such an important voice in the community and a trusted messenger of health information.” 

Ongoing partnerships have helped to support community engagement events, in terms of both execution and creation of awareness materials, she says.   

Tolbert points to the Rise Above COVID campaign as an example of what can be accomplished through collaboration—specifically, growing the participation rate of Black, Native American, and Hispanic populations who were disproportionately impacted by SARS-COV-2. Jumo Health used an omni-channel, bilingual media strategy as well as engagement with barbershop owners and faith leaders to help drive awareness and address barriers to consideration.    

Jumo Health was contracted through a CRO for a study sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases that involved multiple government agencies, academia, and pharmaceutical companies as well as 200 study sites across the country. The timeline for recruitment was tight and the eligibility criteria was stringent—notably, a positive COVID test within the last five days.  

Together with selected partners, Jumo Health developed a comprehensive recruitment campaign and formed a community advisory board enabling alignment with key opinion leaders and their support of grassroots outreach efforts in their communities. “Overall, our referral rate was three times greater than the chain pharmacy that was involved in it, our screen rate was 20% greater than the CRO that contracted us, and 64% of the patients who were randomized came from our efforts,” Tolbert reports. 

‘Doubling Down’

“There couldn’t be a more important timepoint to be doing this work,” says Tolbert, referencing the recent backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Jumo intends to stay true to the cause of health equity. The company was started 15 years ago by pediatricians who created comic books for sick kids so they could understand their diagnosis, she notes. 

Rather than pulling back, Jumo Health is expanding its community partnerships, advocacy relationships, and market footprints, as well as continuing to create spaces for the health equity community to come together, says Tolbert. At the recent Summit for Clinical Ops Executives (SCOPE), the company hosted an Equity in Action dinner where 20 clinical research thought leaders from the pharma and tech industries and underrepresented communities came together for fellowship and to have candid conversations, share their experiences, and help keep the focus on “good science.” 

There was talk about establishing best practices for achieving health equity even as DEI programs were being banned across the federal government and FDA guidance on diversity in clinical trials were being removed, she says. “Across the board what we heard at SCOPE and in conversations we’ve been having with the teams we work with is a commitment to staying the course. We haven’t seen a huge shift away from folks wanting to do this work... if anything, they are doubling down.” 

Based on some of the panel sessions at SCOPE, says Tolbert, there will be a greater focus on study sites over the next year or two to ensure that patients, once recruited for trials, are not lost due to communication snafus or a bad post-enrollment experience. The repercussions of that could be long-lasting.  

“We’re seeing a lot more focus on the full spectrum of patient engagement, including making sure that study sites are better prepared to support the retention of diverse patient populations in studies,” she says. This is happening along with a push for a larger definition of diversity to include not just race and ethnicity but also gender, sexual identity, socioeconomic status, and regional access barriers. 

Tolbert advises those working in the clinical research space who are looking to drive more inclusive recruitment to think strategically and holistically (relationship-building) rather than tactically (community events and curated materials). While randomization and return on investment (ROI) are important end goals, she says, so is return on engagement (ROE). 

The ROE term was coined by Savine DaCosta, the Clinical Trial Diversity Site Lead at Biogen. “It is important to understand the balance between return on investment and return on engagement,” says Tolbert, adding that “how we measure success on the efforts that drive recruitment really needs to vary based on the approach.”