From Martha Stewart to Metrics: Empowering Site Staff for Patient Recruitment

Unlocking the Power of Site Staff  

When it comes to recruitment, Sponsors can either supercharge the site staff or make their lives worse. These frontline heroes handle all patient interactions and control the patient journey right from the start of recruitment — awareness, identification, and prescreening. Whether or not they know the patient beforehand, they are responsible for capturing attention, motivating a call to action, managing referral status, and maintaining engagement throughout the study.

But grabbing attention isn't a walk in the park. Sure, you can initiate trial awareness with tactics like email blasts, paid search, and digital ads. If you have a huge budget, you might even consider hiring celebrities like Martha Stewart or NFL star Travis Kelce. However, while these efforts might raise awareness, there are a lot of downstream activities to coordinate, and Martha won’t be doing them.

And did I mention, that a clinical study still needs to be patient-friendly, jive with the standard of care, offer an optimal onboarding experience, and should consider patient input? And remember, site staff is running multiple studies, all with a variety of local and study-wide recruitment tactics trying to find patients — from matching EHR records to leveraging existing audiences from health apps or advocacy groups. Feeling overwhelmed? We’re only at the awareness stage of recruitment.

Of course, Sponsors shouldn’t do everything under the sun. But can you name a single source of patients to successfully recruit for your study? Absolutely not! The key to success is being able to strike the right balance of a finite set of trusted recruitment partners together with a site’s own patient pool and managing everything with a unifying recruitment technology to maximize both outreach and recruitment throughput. Otherwise, the familiar stats published in Clinical Leader that have haunted the industry for decades will continue to do so:

• Nearly 80% of all clinical studies fail to finish on time, and 20% of those are delayed for six months or more
• 85% of clinical trials fail to retain enough patients
• The average dropout rate across all clinical trials is around 30%
• Over two-thirds of sites fail to meet original patient enrollment for a given trial
• Up to 50% of sites enroll one or no patients in their studies

Navigating which vendors and solutions will best recruit your study and managing the tech stack for each tactic can be tricky. But what if you had the right partner to guide you through this recruitment patient network? What if that partner could centralize the recruitment process and all the sources into one platform, navigating site staff and patients through the entirety of recruitment and even conduct, no matter where they came from?

ProofPilot Takes the Stage

ProofPilot is your go-to partner, making you sponsor of choice when it comes to recruitment and retention processes. Site staff don't want to be saved. They need tools to succeed from the start to recruit both the patients they know and those from outside their practice. We collate the right external patient outreach partners, create messaging that resonates, and enable sites to add their own patients to a high-quality recruitment experience for everyone. Our model delivers a branded experience, worthy of your company and study, while allowing you to assess the performance of each channel and make data-driven recommendations. 

Take the stress out of recruitment! Partner with us today and streamline your entire recruitment process from start to finish. Contact us now to learn how we can help you maximize your outreach and recruitment throughput.