Sluggish patient recruitment is costing the clinical research industry hundreds of millions of dollars in missed opportunity costs.

These costs can range from $500,000 per day for mid-range therapeutics to well beyond $1 Million per day for blockbuster therapeutics.

Novel therapeutics are bound by regional patents, limiting the time from which a sponsor can collect revenue on sales, before competitors enter the market with generics. The quicker a therapeutic can advance through the clinical research pipeline, the greater the revenue which can be recovered by the sponsor.

While the majority of clinical trials do reach their recruitment goals ( # patients), the timelines to reach these are more often than not well beyond initial estimates. The Centre for the Study of Drug Development at Tufts University has spent a great deal of time studying the metrics of patient recruitment. A 2013 study reported:

• 80% of trials do not meet their recruitment timelines
• 11% of sites fail to enroll a single subject
• 37% of sites under enroll

Their conclusion was that over 90% of delays in trial completion are due to sluggish patient recruitment.

So what can you, as a sponsor do to improve your global patient recruitment numbers?

Here are six tips to improve your patient recruitment rate for your clinical trials:

Hover your mouse over each tip a further description.

For more tips, implementation strategies and information on how to impact patient recruitment, check out Advantage Clinical’s course on Impacting Patient Recruitment for Sponsors and CROs.