Last Updated on February 21, 2024
Recruiting into research and keeping participants in a clinical trial is essential for its success. However, it can pose some challenges. In addition, you can discover the methods you should use for your clinical trials to make them successful!
Do you want to know more about how to find patients for clinical trials and the process of recruiting into research? There you are—you’ve come to the right place!
What you will learn?
You will gain valuable insights into best practices for recruiting into research clinical trials, such as:
What Strategies are best to:
- Improve patient recruitment for clinical trials.
- Identify and Prospective Participants.
- Keep participants engaged throughout the trial.
The recruitment and retention of patients are crucial to any successful trial and might present difficulties at times. However, you will complete your clinical study smoothly with patient participation.
Clinical research is one of the most crucial processes in creating and evaluating new medical therapies. Regretfully, low recruiting has resulted in the closure or delay of other studies.
This section explores optimal methods for finding participants, keeping them engaged throughout the trial, and working with a CRO—moreover, the organization’s therapeutic alignment aids in overcoming recruitment obstacles.
Set up your Clinical Trial for Success.
Making proactive study decisions can significantly impact the success of a clinical trial.
Undeniably, choosing suitable sites can affect the work of the study organizer and the sites themselves. Furthermore, it is essential to consider the number of people expected at each site.
Successful studies also have a realistic idea of the time it will take to enroll people. On the other hand, problems with enrollment are bound to happen at some point.
Moreover, another terrible aspect of clinical trial failure is improper protocol design and recruiting into research. Consequently, this issue can completely ruin a study before it gets off the ground.
Furthermore, failure can result from conducting research in a field where recruitment efforts from other studies directly compete with yours. In addition, this situation can significantly impact the success of your research.
What steps can we take to address the obstacles of recruiting into research once we’ve set up our success trial? What preparations can we make in advance to reduce the workload associated with recruitment?
Strategies to Improve Patient Recruitment for Clinical Trial
Here are some ways to make the process of recruiting into research better:
Become Familiar with Your Patients:
When recruiting into research, it’s essential to consider what the patient wants. This way, the trial won’t stress the people participating too much. Moreover, Minerva inquired about preferred clinical study types to gain insight into patient concerns. Patients desired observational and interventional trials, studies addressing side effects, and those investigating new medicines.
For instance, we learned that people with long-term illnesses are only sometimes interested in trials for new drugs or therapies. Advertising these trials can help in recruiting into research. Advertising is the best way to show how this clinical research is better than others. Moreover, before hiring a company to find patients, ensure you know how they customize their outreach for different trial condition areas. As a result, the following steps will help you provide the method is well thought out.
Let Healthcare Professionals know about your Study:
It can be an excellent idea to let the right doctors know about a clinical trial if it’s for a disease that needs patients to have a close relationship with their doctors. A CISCRP survey found that 64% of patients would rather hear about a clinical trial chance from their doctor.
Information about the clinical trial that doctors can share with their patients can be spread easily through outreach tools made just for doctors. Use your network to make the staff at local hospitals and other providers more aware of the study.
Make Use of Speciality Clinics:
Specialty centers are a great place to start when seeking people to join. These clinics are mostly only for people with certain medical conditions, like cancer or rare diseases, and experienced doctors run them. Researchers can easily find people who are already interested in the condition being tested by using speciality clinics.
Many speciality clinics give extra services, like financial help, that can help get people who otherwise might not be able to join the trial.
Reach Out to the Community:
Getting involved in the community is a great way to spread the word about clinical trials and make more people aware of them. Some ways to do this are to give talks at events and conferences, work with local groups, use printed materials like flyers and signs, or host webinars.
Outreach to the community also makes it easy to contact people needing to learn about patient marketing services.
Maintain the Participant’s Interest:
If someone agrees to participate in a clinical trial, you must keep them interested in continuing the study. As part of this, keep participants informed about how the study is going, offer support and resources to help them deal with any problems or side effects, and be available to answer any questions or address any concerns they may have along the way.
Also, when it comes to getting people to take part in clinical studies, there are some things you should never do. For instance, ensuring you’re not forcing or pushing people to participate is crucial. You’ll also have to tell them everything they need to know about the study and any risks that might come with taking part. Also, think about differences in culture and language. Ensure everyone participating can read and understand all trial papers and communications.
Being proactive and working with a clinical study partner early on can help you make a plan. Consequently, this plan focuses on recruiting patients who can navigate the recruiting and clinical trials problems.
Use Follow-Up Services for Patients:
While a sponsor’s primary goal is recruiting into research clinical study, patients may keep putting it at the bottom of their list of things to do. Following up with automated services like emails and texts can help people take the next step without being too pushy.
Some companies that help with trial recruitment will also offer site follow-up services. This way, sponsors can easily track how patients are doing and flag sites that take too long to react. Managing patient attendance well and making recruiting into research as efficient as possible can help you save money.
Get in Touch with People who are interested in Trials:
Calling patients who aren’t eligible for a study is a good use of time and money. In addition, it can also be upsetting for the patients. Furthermore, reaching out to clinical trial-interested patients helps develop an effective process for everyone. Moreover, those with information suggest they are likely to be qualified.
Lab test companies and Electronic Health Record (EHR) companies are two examples. They can give trial sponsors information about blood tests and other patient data. Because of this, they can check beforehand to see if the patients meet the standards for inclusion. Sponsors can access a large group of patients who want to participate. Additionally, they will likely be qualified by working with a clinical trial recruitment company.
Final Thoughts
Finding participants for clinical trials and recruiting into research involves overcoming challenges with creative solutions. Researchers empower themselves by understanding patient recruitment and retention obstacles and applying the strategies discussed, ensuring optimal trial outcomes. Furthermore, embracing these strategic approaches holds significant promise for advancing clinical trial recruitment. Consequently, it contributes to the progress of healthcare in ongoing medical research. Contact us for efficient clinical trial administration services, and make your research more efficient.
