Webinar: Revolutionizing Trial Recruitment with Analytics and Intelligent Activation

Today’s pipeline of promising precision therapies – coupled with a cross-industry push for more representative trial populations – compels us to seek better ways to identify, educate and enroll eligible patients. However, for trials targeting very specific populations, broad-based outreach to potential patients and HCPs consistently misses the mark.

Increasingly, clinical development leaders are now taking a page from their commercial colleagues’ playbook to find these “needles in a haystack.” We recently partnered with Fierce Biotech on a webinar to unpack both the challenges and the opportunities here. The webinar featured three panelists from different parts of the Real Chemistry family:

• Erin DeRuggiero, Chief Digital Officer, Swoop

• Ivan Kouchlev, Managing Principal, IPM.ai

• Jari Rouas, Clinical Trials Portfolio Lead, Real Chemistry

Here are four takeaways from that conversation. You can also find the full webinar at the end of this post.

Recruiting Representative Clinical Trial Populations Has Never Been More Complex

Despite recent efforts to lower access barriers with greater use of decentralized and hybrid trial designs, the industry still struggles to recruit patients as quickly and efficiently as we’d like. More than 85% of trials experience delays, and today’s expansive pipeline of precision therapies puts even more pressure on sites and investigators to find those often-hard-to-find patients who meet each trial’s inclusion/exclusion criteria. Heightened customer and regulator demands for more diverse trials only exacerbate this challenge – especially given legacy mistrust among many minority populations and the tendency among CROs and sponsors to rely on a small number of academic sites that are often inconvenient for many non-urban residents to reach. These companion pressures to increase diversity and accelerate recruitment require everyone involved in clinical trials to consider new approaches.

Bringing Commercial Analytics and Activation Insights to Clinical Development Can Turbo-Charge Trial Recruitment Efforts

Increasingly, progressive life sciences companies have been bringing a more marketing-oriented mindset to the realm of clinical development. Companies like Real Chemistry can complement CROs’ databases and tools with sophisticated, AI-enabled analytics and precise activation programs that help:

• Identify new HCPs with patients who may be eligible for trials,

• Develop appropriate, on-point messaging for both clinicians and potential participants,

• Deliver those messages where, when and how HCPs are likely to engage, and

• Bolster educational materials in ways that enable more productive conversations between patients and their clinicians.

Recruiting More Diverse Populations Requires a Long-Term, Multi-Faceted Approach; Robust Analytics, Coupled with Culturally-Sensitive Messaging, Can Help

It’s not enough to want to recruit more diverse populations – or to target recruitment efforts toward historically marginalized communities. Manufacturers committed to trial diversity must move beyond legacy sites and databases, tapping data and analytics partners who can help them expand the universe of potential patients and HCPs. They must invest in long-term engagement and trust-building efforts. This includes efforts to build relationships with more boots-on-the-ground community organizations, and efforts to support a more diverse set of HCPs who may be ready to become active referrers or trial investigators themselves. And it requires agency partners who can help sponsors develop culturally-sensitive messaging, literacy-and-language-appropriate education materials and resources that reinforce trusted patient/physician conversations.

It’s Time to Rethink How We Measure Success and ROI of Our Clinical Trial Recruitment Initiatives

Recruiting for today’s complex clinical trials requires a multi-faceted, personalized, omnichannel approach. And that may very well mean sponsors need to invest a bit more up front in order to get the multiple touchpoints often required for a patient or HCP to consider inquiring about a trial. As an industry, we need to think more holistically and longer-term about how to find, target and engage potential trial participants. Metrics such as cost-per-recruit may shortchange the impact of more coordinated and personalized omnichannel initiatives. HCPs who take the time to visit a trial education site may not immediately send over a patient – but they may remember the trial opportunity when seeing a different patient one or two months later. And that GI specialist who took the time to learn about an ulcerative colitis trial without sending a patient may become a great referral target for that sponsor’s IBD trial the following year. Those willing to take a more long-term, holistic approach to trial recruitment are likely to see meaningful results.

Interested in learning more? Watch the below recording or send a note to Jari Rouas at jrouas@realchemistry.com. We’re passionate about accelerating recruitment for truly representative trials that advance shared health equity goals. We’d love to find ways to help.

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