Industry Standard Research (ISR) announced the availability of a new report titled The State of Patient Recruitment in Clinical Trials that provides sponsors and service providers with valuable insight into the activities and strategies that drive and restrict patient recruitment in clinical trials.

“The report is a follow up on ISR’s 2009 Patient and Investigator Recruitment Success report in which we examined the patient recruitment topic from the perspectives of sponsors, investigators, and patients themselves. In The State of Patient Recruitment in Clinical Trials we focus on the sponsors’ perspectives and dive deeper into the strategies behind successful patient recruitment campaigns” explained Kevin Olson, CEO, Industry Standard Research.

ISR’s report provides the pharmaceutical and biotech industry with an examination of the major facilitators and barriers in patient recruitment, as well as insight into the best patient recruitment channels, including how the industry uses the internet and social media as recruitment tools. The report also analyzes sponsors’ use of CROs for patient recruitment activities, their willingness to outsource the activity, and the degree to which CROs are missing, meeting, and exceeding recruitment expectations. Olson explained that one of the key findings from the report was that respondents indicated the level of engagement of the site staff and the characteristics of the study protocol were two of the most important factors when evaluating the success of recruitment efforts.

“Recruitment professionals believe site staff engagement and the complexity of the study protocol have the greatest degree of influence over study success. Setting real life inclusion/exclusion criteria, building strong relationships with sites, and ensuring budgets are allocated appropriately will increase sponsors’ chances of recruitment succes.

This is the second recruitment-focused title that ISR has released this year. The first, The State of Clinical Study Feasibility was released in February 2012 and is also available on ISR’s website.