The Rising Stakes of Patient Retention in Clinical Trials

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Heather Horville, solutions consultant, Greenphire, discussed the challenges of retention and trial timelines due to increasing financial and logistical burdens on patients. Horville highlighted strategies to address these issues, such as early planning, patient advocacy, and site selection based on local needs. For complex trials, engagement through diary entries and stipends, and human interaction via concierge services will be critical. Future improvements will emphasize a comprehensive patient journey, incorporating services like travel prepayment to enhance trial success.

ACT: Retention in clinical trials is becoming increasingly difficult, especially with financial and logistical burdens growing for participants. From a clinical operations perspective, how serious is this issue becoming for study timelines and data quality?

Horville: I totally agree with that statement. As we think of trials becoming larger on a global scale and expanding in that way, and then cost of everything these days going up, and everyone being impacted by that across the scale, it is definitely becoming something that we need to address and address sooner on in the process of planning for a trial. Statistically, we see that 30% of enrolled patients end up dropping out throughout the life of a trial, and that's overall, and the same challenges that may cause that retention also cause delays and goals not being met when we think of enrollment and diversity, so when we think of, the first part of that is, you said, study timelines. Well, if we're not meeting our enrollment goals, and it's taking a lot longer for that to happen, and our diversity goals as well, then those timelines are already very much delayed at the beginning of the trial. Then when we think of data quality, as a sponsor, everyone is investing so much time into each patient and going through the process of the trial, every visit, and if a patient ends up dropping out, when we think of all the data points and the study endpoints, and everything that we're not collecting from that patient after having really invested a lot of time and energy into that patient and their journey, then it really does impact that data as well as the overall experience. Definitely agree that it has a huge impact, and in terms of timelines, the upfront enrollment delay and then data quality, we're just not getting all the data if we can't retain our patient.