Two factors fundamentally affect clinical trial success: Patient recruitment and patient retention. Poor performance in either area prevents Contract Research Organizations (CROs), trial sites, and sponsors from collecting the results required to meet drug or treatment approval criteria.

To succeed, life sciences and digital health companies must familiarize themselves with several challenges currently constraining clinical trial patient recruitment and enrollment. For example, reaching enough patients who meet the inclusion and exclusion criteria, enrolling them in a trial, and ensuring they complete all introduced barriers.

Instead of struggling to meet patient quotas and wrestling with ill-fated engagement strategies, partnering with a clinical trial recruitment company like AutoCruitment brings in dedicated technologies and a collaborative team specialized in finding and screening the right patients quickly. In turn, new drugs and treatments gain approval and launch faster—impacting broader patient populations through better healthcare possibilities.

But you can also take steps on your own.

Here’s everything you need to know about the current clinical trial patient recruitment and enrollment challenges, how to overcome them, and how a patient recruitment company like AutoCruitment can help.

Why Recruitment Is a Critical Challenge in Clinical Trials

Today’s clinical trials involve more complexities. Naturally, so does their recruitment.

Trials must include diverse patient populations to gather more accurate, reliable, and universal findings applicable across wide-ranging demographics. Some specific patient populations may be more likely than others to carry far greater risks of chronic diseases than new treatment and drug developments frequently target.

However, data on recent new drug trials shows:

• Only 25% of patients represented non-white demographics despite comprising 40% of the total US population.
• Only 30% of patients enrolled represented populations aged 65 and older.

Moreover, even when clinical trials meet recruitment targets, participation often requires significant time commitments, travel distance, and other barriers burdensome to patients—creating a self-compounding detriment to trial success. Research shows that 80% of clinical trials become delayed due to recruitment problems and dropout rates, with as many as 20% failing due to insufficient enrollment.

So, what’s the solution? The answer is specialized recruitment services, which excel at finding patients and extensively qualifying them to maximize recruitment outcomes.

Barriers to Patient Enrollment in Clinical Trials

Specialized recruitment services like AutoCruitment help overcome initial barriers to patient enrollment in clinical trials via awareness and engagement. One common barrier is simply a patient’s lack of knowledge about trials. Specialized recruitment services use global, direct-to-patient recruitment technology and methodologies to target and directly engage with eligible patients.

These methods also help clinical trials overcome another common barrier: Geography. Instead of risking dropouts with patients located too far from trial sites, these specialized services identify patients residing in prime areas to participate in trials using methods such as geotargeting.

What about clinical research risks, side effects, and trial complexity concerns? Specialized recruitment services include sophisticated online screening methods, in which screeners cover the study protocol with patients, ensuring they’re fully aware of what the trial entails.

One other significant barrier to patient enrollment, particularly in older patient demographics, is digital literacy. But instead of trying to guide patients through unfamiliar digital tools, patient recruiting companies can help streamline processes.

For example, AutoCruitment uses a unique system for capturing electronic medical records. This allows us to tap into health networks and access medical records on the patient’s behalf while remaining HIPAA-compliant. We eliminate the need for patients to manually access scattered digital records, remember long-forgotten website passwords, or contend with other self-reporting issues.

Retention Challenges During Clinical Trials

Clinical trial patient recruitment and enrollment are not the only issues that can impact trial success. Trials often require extended participation, and patients can drop out due to the inconvenience of visits, travel burdens, or even the physical toll of trial side effects. Despite these challenges, patient retention is as important as initial recruitment for trial completion and data integrity.

For clinical trial developments to be successful, trial sponsors need to masterfully target and qualify patients and maximize the potential for retention.

Solutions for Improving Recruitment and Retention

To overcome the current challenges in clinical trial patient recruitment and enrollment, clinical trial teams increasingly adopt digital recruitment strategies and data-driven methods to improve results.

For example, AutoCruitment casts a wide net with digital recruitment efforts to identify interested and qualified participants by leveraging:

• Targeted advertising
• Online browsing behavior
• Geotargeting

Entering potential trial participants across digital channels and initiating broad outreach from the onset makes enrollment more accessible and appealing. Just as slow recruitment causes clinical trial delays, these strategies improve timelines—AutoCruitment’s services help reduce trial enrollment timelines by nine months.

After identifying and screening ideal patients, trials can deploy retention-focused tools like patient follow-up systems and flexible participation schedules to help ensure patients remain in the trial for its duration.

The Role of Technology in Addressing Recruitment and Retention

Technology continually revolutionizes how new clinical trials manage and overcome current clinical trial patient recruitment and enrollment challenges. A more ‘cutting-edge’ example comes from recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), which are starting to help predict patient behavior and identify patients most likely to complete trials.

Other tools, such as digital platforms for virtual recruitment and telemedicine, simplify virtual recruitment and ongoing clinical trial participation by minimizing geographic limitations. Decentralized clinical trials and drug development have suddenly become easier to facilitate.

Studies show that without these tools, trial participants travel an average of 67 miles one way and that rare disease patients (often treated by specialist centers) travel 135 miles to their clinical trial sites.

Patient-centric tools, such as mobile apps and automated reminders, provide equally important impacts by making clinical trial participation easier and more manageable. These tools allow patients to receive timely reminders, access important study information, and easily complete telehealth appointments.

Ultimately, all these technologies help clinical trial sponsors, research teams, and patients overcome challenges facing patient recruitment and retention in clinical trials by streamlining the experience and catering to patient needs.

Improve Clinical Trial Recruitment and Retention With AutoCruitment

The current challenges in clinical trial patient recruitment and enrollment cannot be understated: It’s incredibly tough to find enough qualified, diverse patients who not only strongly suit your trial but will see it through to completion.

However, you can improve your targeting and recruitment efforts using innovative digital solutions provided by AutoCruitment. And with well-qualified patients, you can expect to improve patient engagement and achieve the desired retention figures.

If you’re ready to improve your patient recruitment efforts, AutoCruitment is here to help. As one of the leading patient recruitment agencies available today, AutoCruitment leverages unique technological solutions and high-performing methodologies to target, recruit, screen, and refer patients for the clinical trial process.

Contact us today to find out how AutoCruitment can help trial managers overcome common trial challenges and ensure successful completion.