Supporting Study Coordinators is Vital to Patient Recruitment

As part of our growing focus on Life Sciences at Investis Digital, we are opening up our blog to expert guest contributors on the topic. Today, we are featuring a guest post by Gregg Sweet from The Harte Group, writing on how supporting study coordinators with the right tools can make a meaningful change in enrolling the right patients.

Sponsors and sites always have the same goal: to enroll the needed number of patients to complete a clinical trial on time, but they may not always agree on how to go about it. Many sites believe they can complete enrollment without centralized support and would rather receive budget and use internal resources to create awareness of a study, however, more than 66% of sites don’t meet enrollment requirements for a given trial. This could be because many sites don’t have marketing staff to develop and manage complex marketing programs to reach potential subjects.

Because sites and sponsors are partners in the clinical trial process, sponsors must walk a fine line between managing site relationships — being sensitive to what sites want — and doing what they believe is necessary to meet enrollment objectives.

When evaluating how to best support sites, it is best to start by asking, “Who is responsible for patient recruitment at each site?” At most sites, planning and executing patient recruitment initiatives falls on the increasingly over-burdened shoulders of the study coordinator. It’s easy to see if one simply looks at job descriptions for study coordinators:

• “…plays a key role in recruiting patients for clinical studies.”
• “…promote, advertise, and conduct telephone and face‐to‐face screenings to recruit potential subjects.”
• “…recruiting subjects using flyers, advertisements, letters, etc.”

Study coordinators will tell you that being a study coordinator is a challenging enough job. Simply managing the complexities of multiple clinical trials is enough to fill most days. By adding to that the need to develop marketing programs, something for which many have little to no training or experience, makes the job that much harder.

When deciding how best to reach out to potential patients, a sponsor has to decide whether a nurse or a doctor or an administrator would have better or worse marketing skills than someone who specializes in patient recruitment marketing? And if the sponsor decides to work with a marketing partner, how do they best provide that marketing support to sites in a way that sites want it?

One option is to offer sites centralized patient recruitment support, but execute any support programs locally. This provides the sites the consistent messaging, creativity and marketing insight they need — developed by expert patient recruitment marketers — along with the control to take full advantage of the support in ways that make the best sense for them. Local execution allows sites, often the study coordinators, to select, for example, the awareness materials that make sense for them, or decide whether direct mail or social media is a viable option for them, or work with the marketing partner to plan the timing and details of an advertising campaign. In this model, study coordinators are not sent a box of materials they may not want, need nor use. Sites are not pressured into an advertising campaign that may not be best for them. Study coordinators get a voice and are seen as a collaborator and a true partner in the process — a process in which their experience and opinions are taken into account and valued.

To learn more about this contributing author, click here.

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If you have any questions about our Life Sciences practice, please contact Ian Koenig at [email protected].