Maximizing participant engagement in your clinical trial
Some estimates indicate 85% of trials are failing to recruit enough participants and 80% are delayed due to recruitment challenges and high dropout rates.1 This challenge has been long-standing within the industry, and the adoption of decentralized approaches offer a promising strategy towards maximizing participant recruitment.
Below are 6 impactful opportunities for enhancing participant engagement, as well as how to enable them with a decentralized clinical trial platform:
- Perform simulations of your decentralized approaches to optimize the participant experience. Getting a favorable schedule of assessments that minimizes the number of in-clinic visits and makes research more pragmatic for potential participants requires the use of a decentralized platform. The right decentralized platform allows Sponsors to pressure test their protocol, identify alternative options for data collection and optimize the participant experience by collecting data points outside of a site setting.
- Get a trial-specific recruitment website to maximize your enrollment reach. A web-based recruitment tool lets researchers generate study-specific participant landing pages that can be paired with digital advertising for the clinical trial This ensures that as many trial eligible participants are aware of the clinical trials as possible.
- Optimize participant recruitment with a flexible recruitment partnership strategy. Many recruitment specialists use different approaches to their recruitment efforts by offering unique focus areas that require unique partnerships because there is no “one -size fits all” approach. To support enrollment success, use a program that engages a wide range of recruitment specialist companies to ensure the right partner is aligned with your trial profile.
- Use technologies that facilitate simple and easy trial engagements for participants and caregivers. Far too often, the caregiver is the last to be taken into consideration for accommodating measures throughout a clinical trial but is a driving force in participant fatigue throughout your trial. The deployment of trial technology allows researchers to engage and capture validated endpoint data from participants wherever it is convenient for them through features like telehealth, sensor and wearable integration, eConsent and ePRO.
- Implement notifications to keep your clinical trial front-of-mind. As participants move through the study, you can enable regular participant notifications that are pushed to their preferred device providing a simple reminder to complete an assessment or plan for a trial visit.
- Share the study results with your trial participants. Channels that are directed under the FDAAA 801 or the Final Rule may not be frequently accessed by trial participants so research sponsors should consider alternate modes of communication. Email messages to thank participants for their involvement and updating them on the results of the study acknowledges their sacrifice and builds the likeliness that they will participate in other studies in the future.
The THREAD decentralized trial platform allows for maximum flexibility and functionality that drive successful outcomes, often going above and beyond what is listed here to maximize participant engagement. While maintaining retention throughout the study is the goal, taking decentralized approaches and implementing them in your study can also help with trial diversity by reducing barriers that stop minorities and non-white individuals from participating. Read more from THREAD.