Clinical research provides the foundation for improving patient care and producing life-saving treatments for conditions and diseases from lung cancer to gestational diabetes. However, this research cannot be tested, perfected, or applied without clinical trials. All too often, clinical trials fizzle without successful patient recruitment.

Indeed, patient recruitment remains one of the research industry’s primary roadblocks; as many as one in five clinical trials fail due to insufficient enrollment, but enrollment is the first step. For ongoing success, patient recruitment planning relies on visibility to support continual optimization—using data to preemptively resolve participation challenges, inform engagements with potential patients, and ensure patients have the information and support they need.

Successful recruitment goes beyond locating potential patient referrals. It’s a holistic process that educates, speaks directly to patients’ concerns, and makes them feel supported from beginning to end.

With a unique combination of end-to-end technology and professional engagement and management services, AutoCruitment offers transformative patient recruitment solutions. Increased visibility into patient recruitment funnels is one path to faster, more efficient, and more life-changing clinical trials.

The Challenges in Patient Recruitment Funnels

While clinical trials are experiencing a boom—with more than 500,000 registered globally as of 2024—many potential benefits of this research are compromised by inefficiencies in the clinical trial process. In the US, this contributes significantly to nearly half of all new drugs failing to reach the second stage of development.

Challenges that often lead to poor outcomes may become apparent at several stages when the research industry connects patients to trials and experimental treatments. For example:

• Patients who become disengaged, whether early on or as the trial progresses, drop out due to unclear or delayed communication from trial management.
• Fragmented and poorly coordinated data sources (combined with inefficient manual reporting methods) complicate attempts to enroll recruited patients and track their progress.
• Inefficient or ineffective recruitment progress negatively affects overall operations, potentially affecting the ability to attract investment or partners and conduct future trials.

Successful clinical research depends upon up-front clarity and communication during recruitment and between stakeholders to ensure success at later stages. Lost steps in patient recruitment workflows jeopardize the process from the outset.

Why Visibility Matters in Clinical Trial Recruitment

Visibility into patient recruitment and retention is essential for managing trial enrollment challenges that affect patients’ (continued) enrollment at key research phases. With increased visibility into patient recruitment funnels, sponsors and contract research organizations make smarter, data-driven decisions. They can ensure they’re consistently reaching the ideal potential patients, enrolling them successfully, identifying and remedying any delays they experience, and keeping patients engaged and actively participating.

Personnel can’t preemptively address the various bottlenecks hampering recruitment efforts without being able to identify and understand them. This might include identifying and contacting patients at risk of disengaging. In one scenario, a patient may abandon a trial after numerous enrollment delays related to the incomplete collection of their medical records.

CROs, sponsors, and site staff can’t remedy that outcome afterward. Conversely, if personnel identify which potential patients experience complications with their medical records, they can address it and prevent care delays and participation gaps.

Simply put, with greater visibility, CROs and sponsors can refine recruitment to accelerate patients’ progression through their funnel, which in turn accelerates their access to life-changing treatments.

How AutoCruitment Enhances Visibility Into Patient Recruitment Funnel

Achieving better visibility and patient recruitment functionality is an essential step toward more successful and useful clinical trials—but it’s not a simple one without the right partner. AutoCruitment provides a range of patient recruitment services for every part of the funnel, from optimized patient screenings to data-driven project management, including:

• Direct-to-patient digital recruitment: Incorporate enhanced digital advertising using targeted algorithms to help the research industry connect patients with trials and allow for easy tracking of patient enrollment targets.
• Patient identification and screening: Actively identify the most qualified and motivated patients for given studies, using custom, enhanced screenings that account for inclusion and exclusion criteria to quickly move them through recruitment stages.
• Multistep engagement and enrollment: Provide assistance during the enrollment process and throughout trials via AutoCruitment’s Patient Management Portal, access automated reporting, and efficiently track patient data.
• Electronic medical record (EMR) capture: Benefit from more reliable, convenient, and secure collection of medical data, saving time for both sites and patients.
• Tracking and reporting: AutoCruitment’s centralized dashboard, real-time tracking, and custom reporting capabilities provide the visibility necessary to monitor qualified patients as they progress through the recruitment funnel and discover and fix any barriers they might encounter.
• Compliance and regulatory support: Ensure that all data, study materials, and campaign assets are ethical and HIPAA-compliant, in line with recommended best practices from patient advocacy groups.

AutoCruitment’s tools and technology provide the real-time performance insights needed to improve the next generation of clinical trials. In the words of one organization that benefited from AutoCruitment’s expertise:

“These metrics are outstanding, and we are beyond what we had originally forecasted. The collaboration of all our teams along with the communication and hard work by the sites is apparent in these numbers and meeting our goal under tight timelines.”

Best Practices for Maximizing Your Recruitment Funnel

Impressive technology will only go so far as to benefit clinical trial patient recruitment, however. Trial sponsors and CROs can make the most of their tools with these best practices:

1. Set realistic, clear goals for both sites and patients.
2. Establish rigorous but inclusive eligibility requirements.
3. Address potential concerns early on, allowing workflow to adjust to feedback.
4. Leverage analytics for relevant, actionable insights.
5. Maintain an ongoing patient-centered, supportive, educational approach.
6. Integrate AutoCruitment tools with existing workflows to create a seamless environment of clinical research technology.

Communication (with patients and sites) is key throughout the process. Collecting data—both patient medical records and program performance metrics—early and often will keep the recruitment and enrollment process running smoothly.

Real-World Success Stories With AutoCruitment

The numbers behind AutoCruitment’s benefits demonstrate the resulting impact: A 97% increase in randomizations, with more than 13,000 patients enrolled in trials. But what does that look like in action?

Consider a recent study of pediatric depression, an area in which trials often face significant enrollment challenges. Subjects may struggle to communicate relevant symptoms, while caregivers often express discomfort with the overall issue.

AutoCruitment’s recruitment and enrollment results for one such trial included the following:

• Concluded enrollment five months ahead of schedule, saving nine months in total
• Supported 48 sites in increasing the enrollment rate from 8.97 patients per month to 17.80 patients per month—a 98% increase
• Contributed 61 randomized patients, 38% of total randomized patients
• Referred 532 qualified patients to sites over nine months, initially screening nearly 78,000 individuals to 2,450 via online assessment and arriving at the final, highly qualified pool of participants via additional phone screening.

The equation itself is fairly simple: improved visibility reduces recruitment time and complexity while boosting qualified patient enrollment, which will, in turn, produce more efficient and productive clinical trials—but solving that equation? That’s where it gets complicated, and AutoCruitment’s industry expertise—drawn from over a decade of recruiting for more than 120 medical conditions in nearly 40 countries—helps tremendously.

Key Benefits of Partnering With AutoCruitment

Finding the right patients remains the most important factor in any clinical trial, but sites typically have access to as few as 5% of the patients they need.

AutoCruitment’s technology platform and engagement teams handle the remaining 95%—the proprietary, end-to-end solution delivering a full-service, patient-centric approach.

Focused entirely on connecting patients with trials, AutoCruitment uses its wealth of industry expertise to solve the recruitment and enrollment challenges of the clinical trial process.

This unique blend of state-of-the-art technology with high-touch human involvement offers the best of both worlds. EMR Capture and AI-powered tools effortlessly capture, aggregate, and analyze medical data and documents while AutoCruitment employees perform patient screenings, recruitment outreach, and patient support at sites.

This approach consistently leads to satisfied partners:

• “AutoCruitment’s delivery of service coupled with comprehensive and frequent follow-up demonstrates not only personal site attention and engagement but remarkable collaboration.”
• “I have to say AutoCruitment has the most energetic and pleasant site engagement specialists.”
• “We have more than doubled our number of previous randomizations…Thank you!”
• “We see the progress and you are just the loveliest to work with.”

Without the right technology, trials will not find the right patients. But without the right approach, patients will not complete their trials.

Luckily, AutoCruitment can provide both.

Unlock More Efficient Patient Recruitment With Increased Visibility

Patient recruitment is the key to success in clinical trials, and visibility is the key to patient recruitment.

AutoCruitment’s industry-leading data, reporting, and transparency increase randomization and reduce enrollment times, leading to faster and more cost-efficient trials.

Clinical trials can quite literally be life-savers. Improved clinical trials produce better patient outcomes across every condition, demographic, and treatment modality. Increased visibility in patient recruitment can, as a result, be deeply and wonderfully transformative for patients everywhere.

Contact AutoCruitment today! Let’s start a conversation about how to take your clinical trials to the next level.