Without clinical trials, there’d be no medical progress. Whether it involves translational science or therapies for specialized conditions, everything, from discrete qualitative research to systematic reviews, depends on motivated participant pools and accurate data.

Challenges can scale alongside pool volume, and trials that require hundreds or thousands of participants frequently struggle. Site team overload, fumbled timelines, and dropout rates, can all delay the progress of studies and the real-world impact they’re meant to have.

But even large-scale clinical trial enrollment issues are solvable with the right partner.

In the past, traditional enrollment methodologies have faltered under high-volume demands. Digital recruitment tactics offer a stronger approach. With scalable, technology-leveraged strategies that don’t compromise the well-being of human participants, AutoCruitment, a patient recruitment specialist, contributes more than trustworthy data points; we positively impact patient care and public health.

Why High-Volume Clinical Trials Struggle to Meet Enrollment Targets

No matter how taxed their bandwidth, site workers exhibit an enormous amount of care and compassion for patients. Clinical trials don’t fail due to a lack of effort or heart. They fail because time-honored strategies haven’t stood the test of time… or scale.

One study from the UK showed that less than ⅓ of 114 clinical trials achieved their recruitment targets, a daunting metric that can be especially crippling for long-term studies. In truth, most studies struggle to meet enrollment goals, with more than half of global trials being aborted due to low enrollment rates, according to the Clinical Trials Database.

Regardless of size, trials facing low enrollment often contend with one major challenge: Low-touch engagement tactics.

High-volume clinical trials require communication networks that can handle everything from patient queries to scheduling, but clinical research site staff often lack the capacity. Without proactive follow-up and fielding, even interested prospects can drop off into oblivion.

For larger-scale clinical trials, site-level obstacles to patient recruitment often involve:

• Overwhelmed stakeholders and site workers: Stakeholders from clinical research coordinators to sponsors are routinely low on resources. Traditionally, data collection occurred on-site and when new patients enrolled. Processes such as screening, consent forms, and follow-ups can quickly lead to buildups and bottlenecks.
• Over-reliance on physician referrals: Physician referrals and site databases cover some ground, but they typically only source patients who already have electronic health records. For high-volume studies, especially those that rely on patient diversity, this approach can overlook large portions of the population that are not represented in patient databases.
• Lagging or inconsistent screening processes: Without streamlined systems, each trial site may end up following its own schedule for participant communication. This can result in inconsistent and incongruent workflows, ultimately leading to increased failure rates in clinical trial recruitment screening.
• Limited bandwidth for participant relationship building: Patient experience is one of the most challenging aspects of trials, particularly high-volume studies. When prospects lack patient advocates, they may decline to participate in clinical studies, engage in protocol deviations, or drop out altogether.

Along with site-level challenges, larger clinical trials can also face issues reaching diverse and desired populations due to:

• Poor (or no) outreach to underrepresented groups: Many recruitment efforts fail to reach underrepresented groups, such as those with lower-than-average socioeconomic status and racial and ethnic minorities. Whether due to language barriers, lack of trust, or sub-optimal accessibility, when minority recruitment underperforms, data suffers as a result.
• Poor (or no) strategic use of digital recruitment: Without superior digital enrollment strategies, recruitment reach and efficiency falter. Sites cannot reach specific, underrepresented, and remote communities alone; they require advanced digital strategies such as direct-to-patient recruitment.

Collectively, these problems result in missed enrollment targets, delayed timelines, and increased costs; however, these issues (and their consequences for medical research) can be surmounted with AutoCruitment’s streamlined, centralized, and advanced Patient Recruitment Services.

The Key to Scale: Direct-to-Patient Recruitment with Central Oversight

According to research, the most successful patient recruitment partners share a commonality: They are not bending over backward to try to make traditional enrollment strategies work in an evolving world.

AutoCruitment, a leading third-party recruitment firm, deploys both digital and interpersonal strategies, bringing research study leaders, healthcare providers, and prospective participants into the process.

Our direct-to-patient recruitment strategies provide the precision and high-touch engagement that all three parties require to meet enrollment benchmarks.

Pillars of scalable, modern strategies and patient recruitment solutions include:

• Targeted outreach at scale:AutoCruitment employs the best digital marketing strategies to reach target population prospects across demographics, diagnoses, and geographies. The resulting patient pool isn’t just broad and diverse, it’s laser-focused.
• Transcending geographic boundaries: Large-scale studies can be challenging enough, but they become especially so across broad geographies. Connecting directly to patients across logistical barriers encourages minority participation, enabling recruitment to happen at scale for specific groups without overtaxing physical sites.
• Centralized services dedicated to individual trials: At AutoCruitment we finish what we start. Centralized services allow us to maintain patient communication, track performance, and troubleshoot issues in real-time, providing end-to-end project management.
• Transparent tech-enabled management: Thanks to our proprietary Patient Management Portal, we provide real-time dashboards for stakeholders to review progress, identify roadblocks, conduct statistical analysis, and track KPIs, ensuring visibility throughout each trial’s duration.

In other words, high-volume studies don’t have to compromise on quality. By combining direct-to-patient digital strategies with centralized oversight, AutoCruitment brings coordination and ease to an unnecessarily chaotic process.

Supporting Scale with Smart Screening and Research Site Coordination

Reaching and identifying prospective participants is essential, but it means little if they are not ultimately eligible for a study.

AutoCruitment’s enrollment strategies ensure that only the most qualified participants cross the threshold, adding another layer of protection to timelines, budget, and data integrity.

AutoCruitment accomplishes this with:

• Individualized online screeners: Every trial begins with protocol-specific, tailored screeners (online and phone). These assessments align with precise inclusion and exclusion criteria, which can be updated as they evolve, to ensure ongoing accuracy.
• 24/7 phone screening: AutoCruitment’s in-house Clinical Phone Screening team follows up expediently, often within hours of initial interest. Most prospects arrive at the top of the funnel with a number of questions, and AutoCruitment’s knowledgeable support staff gives them a warm and professional introduction.
• Secure and seamless hand-offs: AutoCruitment’s Patient Management Portal efficiently transfers patients to research sites. By centralizing data entry, data capture, and data accuracy, participant information is relayed seamlessly to sites, meeting both medical ethics compliance and security standards.
• Automated engagement prompts: Once enrolled, participants are greeted with automated reminders, educational literature, and trial and status updates to keep them informed, engaged, and motivated.

Optimizing patient satisfaction is one area where research teams consistently fall short, and it’s often one of the most challenging metrics to meet for ambitiously scaled studies. Providing a humanistic, high-touch experience helps patients feel seen and heard.

High-Volume Patient Recruitment in Action

What can AutoCruitment’s expertise achieve?

Let’s say a major pharmaceutical sponsor launches Phase II controlled clinical trials to test the efficacy of a new vaccine at 40 sites across the United States. Over 6,000 patients need to be enrolled, with a narrow 90-day window to execute.

As a partner, AutoCruitment can prioritize speed without sacrificing quality or representation by:

• Launching a multi-channel digital campaign: First, AutoCruitment targets diverse patient populations nationwide. Using our Patient Management Portal, the team tracks real-time performance in lockstep with the screening team, which conducts 24/7 phone outreach to guide prospects through the patient selection process.
• Collaborating with key stakeholders: Next, AutoCruitment works closely with site staff and the sponsor to tailor culturally competent messaging and outreach materials that comply with an Institutional Review Board (IRB).
• Evaluating Trial Participation: Finally, the new scale undergoes exploratory factor analysis, followed by confirmatory factor analysis. These efforts directly inform structural equation modeling, which enables researchers to analyze patient motivation, comprehension, and decision-making behaviors related to trial participation.

What to Look for in a High-Volume Recruitment Partner

Due to their immediate and ongoing impact, modern recruiting strategies are becoming the new normal, with new “experienced” firms emerging all the time. For stakeholders, choosing the right partner to solve clinical trial recruitment challenges, is about transparency, execution, actual experience, and trust.

When considering which vendor to work with, asking these questions can help you pinpoint the right partner:

1. Can they handle volume across physical sites? AutoCruitment has proven experience managing thousands of study participants across diverse site locations.
2. Do they offer flexible screening options?AutoCruitment supports patient and study diversity by providing a diverse portfolio of screening options, including online, phone, and email opportunities. Each channel can be tailored to the unique needs of your study and participant pool.
3. Are they transparent with performance data? We provide real-time dashboards and clear reporting structures so you never have to guess if timelines will be met.
4. Can they walk participants through your process, from communication to randomization? Initial interest helps, but it doesn’t always hold. AutoCruitment promotes stakeholder engagement by tending to every stage of a patient’s journey through ads, education, screening, follow-up, hand-off, and thereafter.

With AutoCruitment, Scalability is Never Stressful

The first step in launching a clinical trial (recruitment) shouldn’t prevent a study from starting or succeeding. With contemporary strategies that marry technology with sincere, empathetic care, it’s possible to build a diverse population of participants ethically and efficiently.

AutoCruitment delivers a proven model that executes with speed, precision, and personalized patient support for studies ranging from clinical trials assessing investigational treatments to medical device efficacy.

By relieving the burden on research staff and keeping timelines on schedule (or ahead of time), clinical trials in the planning phase and underperforming studies in need of rescue can only benefit with AutoCruitment.

Discover what AutoCruitment can do to scale clinical trial enrollment for your study by reaching out today.