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 mostimportant 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 ClinicalStudy Feasibility was released in February 2012 and is also available on ISR’s website.