Clinical trial recruitment regularly suffers from low enrollment—so much so that 85% of all clinical trials fail to meet their initial targets on time. Yet, according to data collected by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Cancer Institute (NCI), plenty of patients express interest in enrolling in studies: 50% accept when given the opportunity.

Awareness is often the culprit, according to data gathered by the NCI, as 41% of Americans report having no knowledge of clinical trials.

Aside from needing expanded outreach, contract research organizations (CROs), trial sponsors, pharmaceutical companies, and other stakeholders should also evaluate their messaging and engagement efforts at different touchpoints.

Clinical researchers already face a massive undertaking in evaluating whether new treatments are safe and effective. Adding recruitment responsibilities to the process only increases the challenge. Instead of trying to optimize recruitment internally, researchers need a recruitment partner with faster and more scalable solutions: AutoCruitment.

What Is Outsourced Patient Recruitment?

It’s easy to think of outsourced patient recruitment as just another form of marketing or advertising. However, that perception ignores some of the most important services a recruitment partner can provide.

While outsourced recruitment does involve digital, direct-to-patient (DtP) targeting, it’s crucial that your partner also qualifies and engages patients after the initial touchpoint.

By pre-screening potential participants before enrollment (e.g., through population- and indication-specific messaging, online screening, and/or phone screening), ineligible individuals can be filtered out much more quickly from clinical trials.

In turn, time and resources can be saved by reducing the need for examinations, laboratory tests, imaging, and other thorough assessments for ineligible participants.

Advanced patient recruitment vendors also equip trial organizers with the technology needed to accelerate enrollment, such as electronic medical record (EMR) capture and intelligence. Through empathetic, service-minded interactions, patient engagement specialists establish and build upon high-quality first impressions that help foster trust and maintain ongoing participation before pre-qualified candidates ever visit a site.

From marketing campaigns to enrollment and site assistance, leading outsourced patient recruitment services are direct-to-patient, digital-first, and full-service. AutoCruitment not only helps sponsors reach and attract more patients, but also helps find the right ones.

Why More Clinical Trials Are Turning to Outsourcing

Traditional clinical trial recruitment processes, also known as site-based recruitment, heavily depend on healthcare organizations (HCOs) and healthcare providers (HCPs) to refer their patients to studies.

However, these referrals tend to be rarer than people might assume. A survey of physicians and nurses revealed that they only refer about 0.2% and 0.04% of their annual patient volumes, respectively, to trial opportunities.

Moreover, as modern clinical trials become increasingly complex, and researchers define more specific study parameters, it becomes more challenging to recruit sufficient sample sizes from just one site or network. Geography limits site-based recruitment, even when conducting decentralized clinical trials (DCTs).

Managing these recruitment efforts puts more on clinical researchers’ to-do lists and increases the burden on site staff, causing compounding problems. It’s not uncommon for clinical trials approaching the end of their projected timeline to realize they need an additional six months or more just to recruit their sample population at their current enrollment rate. These recruitment challenges prove critical; the most common cause for terminating a clinical trial is low enrollment.

How Outsourcing Can Solve Key Challenges

To improve recruitment outcomes (e.g., greater randomization and diversity or lower screen failures) and shorten enrollment times, successful clinical trials increasingly partner with specialized recruitment firms.

AutoCruitment helps CROs, sponsors, and other stakeholders by:

• Expanding reach: Direct-to-patient and digital-first strategies bypass the bottlenecks and limitations of traditional, site-based efforts to recruit participants quickly. For example, a recruitment vendor could enhance patient access through social media ads while fostering connections with patient organizations and patient advocacy groups to expand its reach and further develop trust.
• Reducing screen failures: Due to poor messaging and targeting, unclear inclusion and exclusion criteria, and limited direct communication capabilities, research sites often experience high rates of screen failures. However, partnering with AutoCruitment enables trials to implement more effective pre-screening processes. Our cost-effective measures ensure that more qualified patients begin enrollment and complete it, all without altering protocols.
• Providing greater randomization: Sufficient randomization and diverse representation greatly impact the value of study data. However, it can be challenging to find and connect with diverse patient populations. AutoCruitment leverages advanced algorithms to expand our recruitment efforts and reach a diverse array of patients through channels and messaging that have the greatest impact.
• Fostering more personable participant engagement: First impressions, experiences, and satisfaction play integral roles in patient enrollment and continued trial participation. At AutoCruitment, we foster trust, educate patients, assist with patient compliance, and provide recruitment materials through empathetic and consistent engagements.

As clinical trials evolve to meet the demands of modern research, outsourcing patient recruitment not only addresses key operational challenges but also opens the door to more patient-centric approaches. Leveraging digital tools enhances accessibility and convenience, especially for underserved or geographically dispersed populations.

When combined with expert strategies for facilitating patient recruitment, sponsors and CROs can accelerate timelines, enhance data quality, and ultimately bring therapies to market more quickly, all while fostering stronger relationships with the patients they serve.

What to Look for in an Outsourced Patient Recruitment Partner

When evaluating an outsourced patient recruitment partner, essential criteria include:

• Patient engagement approach: Look for partners leveraging advanced algorithms and digital recruitment strategies to target and engage potential participants across diverse channels with empathetic messaging. Follow-ups performed by engagement specialists to better facilitate patient recruitment are also crucial. Because applied clinical trials so often struggle to find patients outside of site-based recruitment, your partner should provide a complementary recruitment approach.
• Workflow integration and site engagement: Despite being an outsourced team, your recruitment partner should have the specialized expertise to seamlessly fit within your existing workflows. They should feel like an extension of your internal team. Additionally, when sites begin to feel overburdened, your partner should be able to step in and help internal operations continue smoothly.
• Secure, compliant data management: Maintaining the security of patients’ electronic protected health information (ePHI) becomes increasingly important for ensuring compliance with HIPAA and other regulations. Rigorous data security is also vital to maintaining patient trust and privacy, as well as respecting ethical considerations. Tech-forward recruitment partners always adhere to regulatory standards and best practices, whether facilitating telehealth or gathering data through methods such as EMR Capture & Intelligence.
• Real-time reporting: Recruitment vendors cannot optimize their approaches without continually collecting and analyzing performance data. Transparent, real-time reporting enables CROs, sponsors, and other stakeholders to readily assess trial performance, identify areas for improvement, and address them effectively. The ideal partner will be transparent with data and work to optimize the campaign in real time.

Of course, the most important criterion is a demonstrable history of successful participant recruitment strategies.

Ask potential partners for case studies and performance data, such as:

• Overall enrollment increases
• Average enrollment timeline reductions
• Increases in randomizations
• Interested patients following direct-to-patient recruitment campaigns
• Contribution percentage of total randomizations

Choosing the right recruitment partner hinges on more than promises: It requires proof. A track record backed by data and case studies ensures you’re aligning with a team that can deliver measurable results.

From boosting overall enrollment to increasing randomizations and optimizing direct-to-patient campaign performance, proven success is the clearest indicator that a partner can meet your trial’s specific needs and drive meaningful outcomes.

The AutoCruitment Advantage: Driving Recruitment Outcomes with Speed and Scale

Among potential outsourcing patient recruitment partners, AutoCruitment’s end-to-end services are unmatched.

Starting with global digital targeting, AutoCruitment launches direct-to-patient campaigns with population- and indication-specific messaging that comply with Institutional Review Board (IRB) regulations.

AutoCruitment’s past campaigns have generated hundreds of thousands of interested patients, who are directed to customized online screeners with available EMR integration when required that create a top-level eligibility filter.

Following online screening, AutoCruitment’s patient engagement specialists conduct phone screenings to ensure only the most qualified potential participants enter the enrollment process and minimize site burden and screen failures. Meanwhile, site engagement staff help reduce a trial’s administrative burden, operating as an extension of CRO and sponsors’ teams.

Finally, AutoCruitment’s proprietary Patient Management Portal provides a secure and seamless gateway for completing patient enrollment, tracking informed consent, and equipping researchers with transparent, real-time reporting capabilities.

Pediatric Case Study: Real-World Success

Clinical researchers conducting a pediatric anxiety study discovered that if their enrollment rates continued, it would take 32 months to achieve their target sample size. With only seven months left in their timeline, they needed a solution that could significantly boost enrollment. They turned to AutoCruitment.

AutoCruitment developed a plan that would start raising awareness via digital targeting and online screening to help fill the top of the recruitment funnel. At the same time, site engagement support would help with the sudden influx of referrals.

The campaign managed to generate roughly 62,000 interested patients, which were screened down to 2,945 for additional phone screening. After both rounds of eligibility determination, the research team had 360 highly qualified patients who had passed multiple layers of screening and who were ready to proceed to the next steps of site visits, consent, and ultimately randomization.

After initially projecting an almost 400% increase in monthly enrollments—from 3.4 patients per month to 15.3—to meet the seven-month timeline, AutoCruitment far surpassed expectations by achieving a 535% monthly enrollment increase to 21.6 enrollments per month.

Not only did choosing AutoCruitment as a partner maintain the clinical research team’s initial timeline, it also helped the successful trial finish two months ahead of schedule.

Modern Clinical Research Requires Modern (Outsourced) Recruitment

CROs, sponsors, and other trial organizers already contend with a considerable workload simply from performing their study.

Pressing recruitment challenges (e.g., campaign reach, patient diversity, screen failures, ad hoc site support, and more) also overtaxes site staff and jeopardizes the trial’s continuation.

Revolutionary medical advancements shouldn’t stall due to low enrollment challenges.

Outsourcing patient recruitment to AutoCruitment expands and accelerates your entire recruitment process while measurably improving outcomes and patient satisfaction.

Looking to accelerate recruitment and enrollment for your next study?

Contact AutoCruitment to unlock access to the right patients, faster.