Patient Recruitment Solutions An Internet Based Community Approach

By Author: Lydia Daisy
Total Articles: 13
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Researches managing clinical trials will sight patient recruitment as their single most difficult barrier for meeting study timelines. According to center watch reports 45% of study delays are because of slow patient recruitment and on an average most delays exceed more than six months. Despite the prestudy promise of patients an estimated 30% of study site fail to recruit single subject.

This problem is likely to worsen as number of clinical trials increase in each year and many drugs become more focused, therefore targeting smaller patient pools. In such situations sponsors are contracting the services of patient recruitment firms to perform a rescue, which involves large sums of money for media campaigns (they require urgent implementation, time and ethical approval process). Many clinical development departments have observed short comings for no proper planning for patient recruitment ahead and rescue modes of approaching patient recruitment firms which may limit the tactics that can be practically ...
... employed in a short time frame. Therefore new specialized patient recruitment departments that act as a consultant to their drug development programs are gathering a tool set for patient recruitment a whole suite of solutions.

Patient Recruitment Solutions

The most common proactive approach to expanding the pool of potential patients (beyond those known to the clinic) involves media campaigns. Adverts for clinical trial participants are placed in a variety of media including local and national newspapers, lifestyle magazines, local radio, clinic leaflets and posters. They may even engage the involvement of community outreach organizations and sometimes include television advertising (although this is rarely employed outside of the US). Interested candidates are directed to a telephone number and/ or website where they can learn more about the study and answer simple questions to determine their qualification for a formal screening visit. Telephone screening can be successfully performed by staff at individual study sites, call centers and using interactive voice response (IVR) systems.

Many pharmaceutical companies have the perception that this style of advertising is unethical or prohibited in numerous countries outside the US, but in fact it is acceptable to both ethics committees and regulators in most countries. Such use of media has the potential to reach large population simultaneously, however, there are usually high costs associated with adverts and their "shelf-life" is very short.

Outreach via the Internet

As Internet usage is rapidly expanding in the present days. The internet therefore represents an expanding community and has great potential for enhancing patient recruitment into clinical trials if applied effectively.

Community - driven approach

Early approaches at patient recruitment using the internet yielded disappointing results. There are billions of websites worldwide: this fact alone can limit the ability of web users to locate a relevant clinical trial opportunity. Banner advertising and pop-up messages irritate web users rather than present them with information of relevance - these are generally ineffective methods of directing traffic to a clinical trial opportunity. Moreover this approach is limited to subset of patients who are actively seeking a clinical trial and ignores those who may be interested if presented with relevant information.

Many web users will seek information about medical conditions and treatments from time to time. Beyond the small subset who actively search for a clinical trail opportunity, the large pool of users represent the target population for a therapy under investigation and specifically for a particular clinical trial. Combing relevant accurate and impartial health care information with education and information about clinical trials in general, and specific clinical trail opportunities, online communities, can engage their audience with regularly updated information and communications enabling long term relationship to be built that enhances the lifestyle of the subject.

Through such communities effective educating and information about clinical trail opportunities can be delivered providing a highly targeted and effective way of reaching out to the target population. The recruitment pool for the clinical trial candidates is a subset of total market or therapy under development. The only differentiators between the population targeted by the therapy and recruitment subset are, a) potential patient knowledge of clinical trial opportunity and b) their willingness to sign informed consent. By developing and using online communities of patients (efficient and focused way) facilitates the widening of pool of target patients who have knowledge of clinical trial opportunity and through education increase their willingness to be a part of such activities.

Few Practical application of community driven web approaches:
Simple information-rich clustered sites.
Navigation design.
Building engagement and trust.
Building clinical trails candidate database and Recruiting subjects

An appropriate use of technology has great promise in enhancing patient recruitment. Pharmaceutical companies are becoming better prepared to include additional patient recruitment activities as part of their prestudy planning and budgeting, using technologies in the above discussed ways provide cost effective and focused approaches that are valuable components of patient recruitment tool kit.

Resource Box:

This is an informative article explains the approaches used for patient recruitment. MakroCare SMO division offers site management services and specialized patient enrollment in emerging regions of the world making it a preferred provider to a number of pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies to support their Phase I-IV clinical trials in various therapeutic areas.