Pacing obesity trial enrollment, anchoring eligibility to stable real-world therapies, and building site and physician relationships improve retention and data quality more than aggressive recruitment or restrictive exclusion criteria do.
Feature|Articles|July 17, 2026
Patient Recruitment in Clinical Trials: Why the Industry's Longstanding Approach Is No Longer Fit for Purpose
Author(s)Andy Studna, Senior Editor
As the FDA's single-trial standard raises the cost of recruitment failure and diversity expectations intensify, sponsors are under pressure to move beyond study-by-study outreach toward programmatic, relationship-based approaches that treat patient engagement as a long-term strategic capability rather than a per-study operational task.
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Patient recruitment has always been one of clinical development's most persistent and costly challenges, but a convergence of regulatory change, diversity expectations, and community trust deficits is forcing sponsors to fundamentally rethink how they identify, engage, and retain trial participants. The study-by-study, outreach-driven model that has defined recruitment for decades is giving way to something more programmatic, relational, and behaviorally informed.
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