Worldwide patient recruitment continues to be the most predominant reason clinical trials fall behind projected enrollment goals. Industry sources say that for every day a drug is delayed to market it can cost the company anywhere from $1M to $8M a day. What if you could give back valuable time to your study managers so that they could focus on their core competency – managing the overall trial process? Freeing their time yields a better chance for on-time study completion, thus potentially impacting commercial ROI. Would that interest you?
I started with patient recruitment provider D. Anderson & Company (now DAC Patient Recruitment Services) in 1998 and since then I have managed recruitment and retention strategy in over 100 trials across 70 countries. As a recruitment provider, we often operated as a traditional Functional Service Provider (FSP) for our clients, and for a long time, I believed that was effective. It wasn’t until we were acquired by Imperial in 2010, and became a specialized vertically integrated recruitment provider, that I began to understand where we were missing the boat.
In February I was meeting with a client in New Jersey – a mid-size CRO that found themselves in a tight position, needing to wrap their recruitment efforts within truncated timelines (5 months). We were looking at 100 patients for a type 2 diabetes program. They needed everything minus the kitchen sink; social media, website, site selection, patient outreach, translation of all components into 13 languages, and global distribution into 11 countries. With my old FSP model, we would have had to try and organize half a dozen suppliers to make this happen – IF we could make it happen. But now because of our specialized model, I only had to look inside our own proverbial four walls for the solution set. It saved our client time, cost, and a large amount of risk.
