Clinical trials are essential to the development of new medications and treatments. However, enrolling participants can be difficult for even the most experienced parties.
The percent of the population that is enrolled in clinical trials is remarkably low. The “high” end of includes the US and the EU at just 5.4% and 4.3% respectively. From there participation rates drop to around 1% or lower. In addition, a significant percentage of trials do not reach their patient complete participation goals, nearly half – 40 percent – of cancer trials.
With both recruitment and retention of adequate trial participants as significant barriers to successful development of new treatments, focusing on better ways to manage clinical trial enrollment is critical.
This blog post will share four tactics to increase clinical trial enrollment and help you move new treatments and therapies closer to the market.
Increase Clinical Trial Enrollment With These 4 Tactics
1) Set, Measure and Share Enrollment Goals with Partners
You can't improve what you aren't measuring. Before you start integrating new tactics and recruitment efforts, it's critical to establish baseline metrics to determine your enrollment goals.
At a minimum, you want to ensure you set an initial enrollment goal that aligns with the minimum number of patients required to achieve definitive results. From there, you can establish additional goals.
Quick tip - be sure all your goals align with your overall objectives. Don't select a number just because,iIt'd be great to hit it. Make sure your enrollment goals have meaning in the trial.
After defining these goals, please don't keep them hidden away! Communicate them to your team and all partners. Make everyone an active participant in reaching the goal and keep them updated on how enrollment tracks these goals (preferable through a digital platform like Cloud Coconnity).
2) Understand and Plan for Common Objections/Barriers to Participation
By far, the biggest obstacle to driving clinical trial enrollment is trust. If potential participants don't trust any aspect of the trial (from the physicians to the medications), it will be harder to encourage them to participate.
Trust is a direct result of communication. The more efficient and open you are with your communications about the trial (the independent physicians overseeing the trial, the FDA protocols being followed, etc.), the more likely you will build trust within your recruitment efforts.
Another way to build trust in your trial is to highlight the role of your oversight committee in your communications. Some potential participants may have a distrust of pharmaceutical companies or of the medical providers associated with them. However, as an oversight committee acts Independently of sponsors and providers, it can help to ease concerns and foster trust in the trial.
Trust isn't the only obstacle standing in the way of patient enrollment success. Other common obstacles include:
Location
Transportation
Finances
Competing Obligations
As an exercise, put yourself in the shoes of a potential participant. Identify the potential roadblocks that might interfere with their participation. Then outline how your trial and recruitment plan will address these objections.
3) Optimize Your Recruitment Efforts
Increasing enrollment can be boiled down to one factor for many clinical trials - a high-performing recruitment effort. The better optimized your recruitment strategy, the more likely you are to attract and engage trial participants. Below, we've laid out five key factors of a robust recruitment effort.
1) Zero In On Your Target Demographic
Age/Gender/Medical History are all critical demographic factors in recruiting your ideal audience, but be sure to include additional demographic and psychographic data into your messaging strategy. The more you understand about your ideal participant, the greater the opportunity to tailor your recruitment messaging and trial experience to their needs.
2) Increase Awareness of Your Clinical Trial
No one will be able to join your trial if they don't know anything about it! Dedicate the resources you need to develop and manage a multi-channel strategy that drives awareness of your clinical trial among your target audience.
3) Streamline the Application Process
Making a potential enrollee aware of your clinical trial is just the first step in securing a successful enrollment. Cut back on costly ad wastes and reduce form abandonment by streamlining the trail application process and providing a user-friendly enrollment experience.
4) Provide Incentives for Enrollment
Supercharge your recruitment efforts by offering incentives to participants. As a general rule of thumb, the higher the value of the incentive, the more significant its influence on a participant's decision to enroll. That said, there are diminishing returns. Experiment with various levels of incentives to determine which delivers the best value to your trial.
5) Engage with Participants Throughout The Trial to Avoid Drop Off
The cost of attracting clinical trial participants can quickly add up. As such, you want to do everything in your power to reduce drop-off and keep retention levels high throughout the trial. One of the simplest ways to improve engagement is to provide consistent communication. The more you're talking with your participants to encourage their ongoing participation, the less likely they will drop off. Consider deploying patient engagement software to do this effectively.
4) Create a Single Source of Truth to Measure and Communicate Enrollment Information
Siloed data is expensive data. And it does not provide timely decision support information. The more barriers to tracking and sharing your data that exist, the less likely your team will be able to promptly analyze and respond to enrollment challenges. Effective measurement and communication of enrollment information requires better access. An integrated software platform can create a single source of truth for decision makers and reporting, as well as eliminate data leakage, loss, and expensive administration.
Be sure to incorporate a single source of truth for your enrollment data that is available to decision-makers anywhere and anytime. Cloud Concinnity is a powerful cloud-based, integrated platform that drives a higher level of efficiency, speed and risk mitigation while unlocking the value of big data for better decision making..
Improve Communication. Enhance Transparency. Drive Enrollment.
Whether it’s through your Safety Review Committee (SRC), Clinical Trial Steering Committee (TSC) Data Monitoring Committee (DMC/IDMC/DSMB), Clinical Trial Advisory Board, or CRO Oversight, the more accessible your enrollment data, the more opportunities you have to optimize your recruitment efforts. Strong enrollment comes from having a powerful communication strategy that aligns with data transparency.
Purpose-built for trial oversight optimization, Concinnity is a single, secure platform where processes that significantly impact the course of a program are managed, executed, and recorded.