The clinical trial process is fraught with pitfalls, and not every study that makes it through start-up reaches a successful conclusion. The inability to recruit and retain the required number of study subjects is a major reason why many studies fail.
By applying some of these tips and strategies, you can elevate yourself and your colleagues to the 30 percent of happy and successful clinical trial teams that meet their recruitment targets on time and ultimately bring a drug product, or a device product, to market.
The press release
There’s no publicity like free publicity, and that’s what you get when your message finds its way into local and national media via your carefully crafted and ethics committee-approved press release. As well as sending these to newspapers, television, and radio stations, don’t forget to include medically oriented websites like WebMD, Medscape, and Healthline.
Major medical institutions like the Mayo Clinic, Harvard University, or the Cleveland Clinic might be able and willing to project your message.
Direct access via healthcare professionals
The COVID lockdown of 2020 had a profound effect on patient enrollment in clinical trials. Jennifer Byrne, who sits on the Board of Directors of the Association of Clinical Trial Professionals. She talks about obtaining permission from physicians to directly contact their patients about a clinical study that may be relevant to them. This approach has been well-received by clinicians. Patients, too, are more likely to take an interest in your project if it has the blessing of their primary care physician.
Clinical studies as patient care
Ms. Byrne is also a fan of the growing trend toward clinical research as a care option. An extension of patient-centricity, this emerging paradigm places the patient’s experience at a given point in a clinical trial within the context of their overall well-being. Individuals are more likely to participate in a clinical study if there is a chance that they will receive a high standard of medical care. In addition, they know that their participation in a trial will benefit other people.
Social media and clinical trial enrollment
In a systematic review article published by the Journal of Medical Internet Research (October 2020), Darmawan et al concluded that social media strategies in clinical trial enrollment can not only improve clinical trial participation and obtain definitive clinical trial results but also reduce the cost per human subject.
Reaching out to potential clinical trial participants via Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram enables you to customize your message for a specific target audience. Moreover, social media can also help you achieve diversity in your research study by virtue of an increased presence on social media platforms by minority groups such as African Americans or indigenous people.
Social media platforms offer the flexibility to add various forms of digital content like images, audio files, and videos. This gives you a wealth of opportunities to augment and illustrate your message. This notion is espoused in Whittaker’s 2017 literature review, which focuses on Facebook as a recruitment tool.
Having created your irresistible digital content and carefully placed it in targeted corners of your chosen platform, you can sit back and watch your initial consumers click “share” and forward it to their followers, friends, and family, amplifying your message in a way that a classified ad in a local newspaper might not.
Assembling your recruitment toolbox
While digital recruitment strategies are exciting, cost-effective, and trendy, we abandon conventional means of clinical trial recruitment at our peril. Patient recruitment tactics such as newspaper, TV, and radio advertising; leafletting anything from doctors’ offices and public health service settings to supermarkets and train stations; and slapping posters on anything from lampposts and buses to stray cats will always have their place.
While these means may not be aimed directly at your target population, that commuter, shopper, or cat lady might know someone who would be interested.
For one thing, not everybody has access to the internet. The elderly, less well-off, and rural communities may not be electronically connected. Besides that, how will you communicate with your target population when the power cuts out? Identifying, reaching, and attracting subjects to your study is too important and too difficult to rely on any one method.
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