Innovating in clinical trial recruitment

Clinical trial recruitment is in crisis, with 80% of trials failing to recruit the required number of patients on time. There are few instances in life where we are happy achieving a score of two out of ten, so why are we allowing this to happen in an industry where the end result is a delay in getting life-changing treatments to patients (not to mention billions of dollars of additional costs)?

At the root of this problem is an industry that has been slow to adapt to drastic change over the past 20 years. If we compare the number of trials registered on clinicaltrials.gov there were 13,460%1 more trials registered in 2018 than there were in the year 2000. To put this into perspective, the number of registered trials has increased six times more than Amazon sales over the same period of time. Unfortunately, we haven’t changed our approach at the same pace.

In a time where Google, Apple, Airbnb, Uber etc. have transformed nearly every industry to be completely customer-experience centric we often still take an approach that avoids considering the end customer all together. Instead we focus on the feelings and needs of investigative sites and HCPs missing the fact that the patients are now the ones in control.

• Read the article in full in pharmaphorum's Deep Dive digital magazine