Patients Recruitment

Patient enrollment is the most time-consuming aspect of the clinical trial process. The leading cause of missed clinical trial deadlines is patient recruitment, taking up to 30 percent of the clinical timeline.

Improving patient recruitment rates offers pharmaceutical and medical device companies one of the biggest opportunities to accelerate the pace of clinical trials – making it possible to reduce time to market.

As the number of patients needed for clinical trials rises – as safety and regulatory issues drive trends toward larger and longer trials – the demand for patient recruitment services grows.

RECRUITMENT METHODS

MEDICAL OFFICE RECRUITMENT:

The physicians and nurses of our network, informed about the study, approach the patients when they come to the medical office for their regularly scheduled appointments.

TELEPHONE RECRUITMENT:

Usually, we add telephone recruitment to the protocol in an effort to increase the recruitment rate approximately one year after the recruitment start. We send letters to the targeted patients to inform them of the study and then followed-up with phone calls to recruit them into the study. Patients have the option to return postcards if they did not want to receive the phone calls. Those patients who expressed interest in study participation over the phone were scheduled to come in to the Medical office for further screening.

FLYERS:

Recruitment flyers are posted in medical offices.

RECRUITMENT MONITORING:

The recruitment statistics are generated monthly and presented to the investigators and co-investigators of the study and to the recruiters.