August 07, 2025
1 min read
Key takeaways:
- Michela Cimberle was honored for her story on health disparities and bias in large datasets.
- Healio received seven APEX awards.
Michela Cimberle, senior staff writer for Healio | OSN, won an APEX Award of Excellence for a 2024 exclusive story on diversity in clinical trials and efforts to improve health equality.
Cimberle said she was inspired by a conversation she had with Amitha Domalpally, MD, PhD, to dig deeper into health disparities and bias in large datasets. The experts she interviewed detailed how these biases affect communities and what needs to be done to improve the situation.
“Enhancing diversity in clinical trials is a topic that has raised my interest and has been close to my heart for quite some time,” Cimberle said. “Overcoming inequalities and discrimination is per se a goal our societies ought to pursue in all fields, but not many people are aware of how lack of diversity and inadequate representation of racial and ethnic minorities in clinical trials can affect the validity and applicability of research findings. Drugs and treatment strategies that are tested on an exclusively or prevalently white population may not be equally effective and safe in minority groups, leading to further exacerbation of existing health disparities. Furthermore, racially biased datasets can affect the training of AI models, leading to misdiagnosis and hindering treatment in other groups of people.”
Healio earned seven APEX awards, including two Grand Awards.
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