Pharma ‘forced to innovate in patient recruitment and retention’
pharmafile | January 27, 2016 | News story | Research and Development | Tufts, clinical trials, patient recruitment, patient retention
The ‘critical need’ to improve recruitment and retention in clinical trials is driving pharma to create a “structural change in clinical research”, according to an academic report.
Research drawn from discussion with industry leaders, by the Tufts centre for the study of drug development in Boston, says that pharma companies are being forced to respond to “strong and growing pressures to accelerate the pace at which new medicines are launched.”
As a consequence, “drug developers are innovating clinical study volunteer recruitment and retention to significantly improve clinical trial performance and efficiency.”
Some of those new approaches include using Big Data to identify and understand patient populations, engaging the ‘voice of the patient’ in trial design, and using new technologies and social media to reach, attract, and keep patients.
The critical need to improve recruitment and retention for increasingly complex clinical trials is underscored by low awareness and over saturation among patients and health care providers, which have rendered traditional recruitment methods, such as advertising, less effective.
Other points made in the report include:
• Patient-centric study teams are using real-time data to understand and adjust the patient recruitment process as it unfolds
• More could and should be done to improve outreach to referring physicians, a primary conduit to clinical trial patients, as 82% of physicians say they’d be more willing to refer patients if they developed a working relationship with a clinical trial investigator
• Social media, which already supports communication within patient communities, will grow as a recruitment tool by providing new pathways between sites and specific population groups
• Comprehensive electronic medical records (EMRs) and health files will play a major role in patient recruitment within five years, but, for now, much of the relevant data do not exist in EMRs, and what does exist is difficult to search across files
Professor Ken Getz, director of sponsored research at Tufts CSDD concludes: “The need to improve patient enrollment and retention rates is urgent and becoming more so, especially as we enter the era of stratified and precision medicines, in which investigative sites will need to recruit volunteers from more narrowly defined, and therefore more limited, sub-populations.”
Lilian Anekwe
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