Health Equity and Access to COVID-19 Treatments Available through Emergency Use Authorizations.

Understanding and evaluating equity in access to care is a critical component to ensuring health equity for all individuals. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration made unprecedented use of its regulatory authority by authorizing the use of unapproved products through Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs). We use data from the U.S. National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) to understand how access to therapeutic products authorized under EUAs has varied across COVID-19 patients and over time. We find that Black patients were more likely to receive early EUA drugs while White patients were more likely to receive monoclonal antibodies. Male patients were more likely to receive any EUA drug than Female patients. Patients in Metropolitan areas were more likely to receive EUA drugs than patients in other regions. Additionally, differences in the rates of exposure to EUA drugs by gender, rural-urban classification, and length of stay decreased over time while differences by race and ethnicity have generally persisted. Our project identifies inequities in the rate of access to EUA drugs across patient groups that can inform policy makers in future planning and decision making.

A survey on perceived medication guide reading and comprehension ease among US adults.

Medication guides (MGs) provide patients with important information about certain prescription drugs to help them take these drugs safely. We surveyed US residents about their perceptions of MG readability and understandability. We randomly sampled 5204 US residents (age 18+) from Ipsos's KnowledgePanel to complete a two-part survey. Only respondents who reported receiving an MG with their prescription drugs (n = 3852) completed part 2, which included two key items: How easy to [(1)read/(2)understand] are the MGs that you have received from a pharmacy along with your prescription medicines? (1 = Very easy, 5 = Very difficult; reverse-coded). Health literacy (HL) and demographic data were also collected. After weighting our data, we found that 85% of respondents who reported receiving an MG perceived this information as 'very easy' (27.3%), 'somewhat easy' (28.3%) or 'about average' (29.3%) to read. Eighty-seven percent of respondents who reported receiving an MG perceived it as 'very easy' (27.6%), 'somewhat easy' (30.2%) or 'about average' (29.5%) to understand. ANOVAs revealed higher average perceived MG reading and comprehension ease scores among respondents presumed to have adequate versus inadequate HL (ps ≤ 0.0006). Younger or less-educated respondents and non-Hispanic Blacks perceived MGs as easier to read and understand, on average, than their counterparts (ps ≤ 0.0001). Many of these relationships remained intact in models predicting perceived MG reading and comprehension ease (ps ≤ 0.001). Adjusted R2 values across models were small, however (≤0.06). Our findings suggest most US residents (18+) who received MGs perceived them to be 'about average' to 'very easy' to read and understand.