Streamlining Patient Recruitment with Technology

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, Yael Elish, founder, CEO, StuffThatWorks; and Julie Ross, president, CEO, Advanced Clinical, discussed results from the Barriers in Clinical Trials survey conducted by StuffThatWorks. Key challenges identified by the survey include lack of physician communication, patient education, and the complex recruitment process. Elish and Ross highlighted how the findings can be used to streamline processes and leverage patient data to improve clinical trial recruitment.

ACT: How can key stakeholders in clinical research better educate and engage their patients?

Elish: You have to also remember that for a very significant number of patients, the severity level that is reported and the level to which it interferes with their personal lives is very significant, so they can be treated as ordinary people. If it's difficult for a person that doesn't suffer from a chronic condition, to change the their daily lives and accommodate something, then it's even way more difficult for someone who is suffering from a chronic condition to do that, let alone the process itself, the hurdles that you have to go through, the number of people that you have to talk to during the screening and after the screening, and this whole hand holding thing, which is, again, not ideal, and is causing a significant percentage of people that could have participated and are eligible to participate to end up not participating because they haven't been hand held properly throughout the process. There needs to be a much smoother process in which someone is identified, communicated to onboarded, their data is onboarded, the whole thing needs to be brought to the next level in terms of both technology and optimizations. I always think it's very funny that, when I started StuffThatWorks also, that in every other aspect of our lives, other than health, everything is so optimized to be convenient for us, so that we end up buying something or whatever you have, you have all this data about us, everything is data driven, everything is optimized, every piece of the funnel is polished to maximum, and when it comes to health, and it's along everything, along the way in every little aspect of fragmentation is huge, and clinical trials is also just one of these reflections, but it's interesting, because in clinical trials, this is where the interest would be aligned, because financially, the amount of money that is being lost every day of delay, which is usually caused because of recruitment is enormous, so here, at least financially, you're supposed to have alignment of interest, and it's, it's not actually happening.