Modernizing Patient Recruitment

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Cameron Breze, product manager, Inovalon, discussed challenges in patient recruitment for clinical trials. Traditional recruitment methods, such as manual outreach, are now less efficient due to accessibility issues. Breze highlighted technology as a way to address recruitment challenges, which can be leveraged to automate and streamline processes, reducing labor intensity and errors.

ACT: Patient recruitment has been a challenge in the industry for some time, but what are some more specific paint points around recruitment the industry is currently dealing with?

Breze: With respect to patient recruitment, there are quite a few things to keep in mind when it comes to where the industry trends are heading. As you know, there are more and more initiatives to diversify and increase access to a lot of clinical trials that have been not available to certain populations in the past. The efforts there are very well intentioned, and we're doing everything we can to structure structurally support those changes. With that said, all change comes with different challenges and barriers to growth. With respect to recruitment, traditionally, you would have maybe an academic medical center or a clinical research site reach out or speak to patients, where they come in with a particular condition. There might be a team of superstar researchers that reach out and say, person to person, “Hey, would you like to participate in this trial,” which is a manual effort, and has had success in the past, and will always be a part of recruitment efforts, that said you miss out on a lot of the population if you don't consider, say, the people who couldn't afford to go to the doctor that day, but have that condition or are busy at work and can't actually make the follow up appointments for that recruitment, so weaving in ways to incorporate more flexibility in those clinical trial offerings is a way that we can continue to diversify and expand that range of patients who are recruited. Then beyond that, there are more atypical and more complex trials that are available. In the past, where you might be testing an antibiotic or something to treat your blood sugar, regulate your blood sugar for diabetes, some of these are trials are for very, very specific types of cancer or genetic diseases that may manifest over time, so the barrier to entry in terms of getting a patient to the door who's willing to participate in the trial exhibits all the characteristics that are required by the protocol for the inclusion and exclusion criteria, can be quite a challenge. It's always going to be a combination of manual effort, and now more so than ever, we're leveraging technology to simplify and automate and follow up with these patients where it would be too labor intensive, too time intensive in the past.