DPHARM 2023: Challenges in Patient Recruitment

In an interview at the 2023 DPHARM conference with ACT editor, Andy Studna, Colleen Hoke, co-founder and CEO, ObjectiveHealth, discusses the challenges she is currently seeing in patient recruitment including the role of trust and personalized medicines.

Hoke: Trust. I'd say patients have to trust the process. They trust in their doctor. They have to trust it's the right thing for them. They have to trust that it will fit in their lifestyle and I think we have to overcome that as an industry and there's all different types of research. There's lots of different people trying to address it in lots of different ways and it all needs to happen. There's really a huge mismatch between supply and demand; demand in terms of improving our lives with personalized medicine. It's going to take a number of different solutions to get the right patients to the right trials, but I would say trust is paramount and then I think we're lacking a framework to support patients and their doctors or patients and their caregivers and we're all trying to build that too.

Hoke also presented in a DPHARM session on ObjectiveHealth’s solutions. Along with Josh O’Rourke, chief technology officer of ObjectiveHealth, the duo explored a real-world case study demonstrating the combined impact of the enrollment solutions: ObjectiveScreen and ObjectiveView.

ObjectiveScreen is the company’s artificial intelligence-recruitment tool. Rather than working off of social media or online campaigns, it is embedded into coordinators’ workflows at the company’s sites. It syncs with the electronic health care systems and uses machine learning to identify candidates as they are visiting the practice.

As a result, the solution enables patients to be identified “on-the-fly” as they come into the practice.

ObjectiveView is designed for sponsors. It works hand-in-hand with ObjectiveScreen to offer a real-time view into the total eligible recruitment funnel for all enrollment activities. Sponsors are given full access to the data, with which they can create criteria as they see fit for their study.

More on the entire presentation can be found here.