There are more than 491,000 clinical studies registered around the world this year. Despite the fact that they’re so prevalent, patient recruitment is an ongoing challenge for both research sites and sponsors. Without fresh recruitment strategies and process improvements, patient recruitment often stalls and throws off enrollment timelines, increases trial costs, and causes delays in critical patient care.
But what’s the root? What are common clinical trial patient recruitment challenges to be aware of, and to get ahead of? We discuss 4 of these in a podcast conversation with PharmaTalk Radio.
With protocols getting increasingly complex, and with how strict eligibility criteria can be as therapies get more targeted, participant pools can be limited to begin with. From a visibility standpoint, sites traditionally don’t have a complete picture of all of the patients that are available for consideration; rather than viewing a central patient database, they often have patient information spread out across paper logs and spreadsheets.
Disparate systems at research sites also make processing patient referrals a challenge. When sites receive patient referrals from a variety of sources, they can encounter additional administrative burdens, tracking patients across emails, spreadsheet exports, and more.
Patient awareness of clinical trials is still low compared to the number of trials available. Unless their physician is directly connecting them to trial options, it can be hard for patients to discover and learn about specific clinical trials as therapeutic options for their condition. Beyond that, it’s hard for patients to find the one trial that’s the best fit for them, let alone to easily self-identify for that trial, find a convenient site location, and start the pre-screening process.
While sites routinely pre-screen patients, sponsors rarely have access to those pre-screening logs. Even if they do receive those logs, sponsors often don't use the information within them. What that means: Sponsors miss out on the earliest data that pinpoints enrollment barriers.
That data can show specific patterns in eligibility criteria failures, as well as why patients might be choosing to not participate in a trial. Without these insights, sponsors can’t see problems in recruitment early enough to solve them. Problems can include:
When sponsors can’t see these challenges during recruitment, they can’t activate campaigns or targeted site support to address them when it matters.
Typically, sponsors don’t have a unified view of how different patient sources are performing. That includes recruitment vendors, campaigns, and site efforts. This lack of visibility makes it difficult to understand the performance and effectiveness of recruitment spend, which is a significant part of study budgets.
One of our experts discussed these four challenges on the PharmaTalk Radio podcast, as well as how technology can help improve processes around patient recruitment. Learn more about the solutions that are available – listen to the podcast now.