Blog

In this blog we will compare traditional versus digital methods of patient recruitment for cardiovascular disease clinical trials. Drawing on our more than 16 years of experience in which we supported the patient enrollment of over 70 cardiovascular disease clinical trials around the world, we demonstrate how data-driven digital patient recruitment can solve many of the recruitment issues in heart disease trials.

We look at:

1. Traditional methods of patient recruitment for cardiovascular disease

2. Digital methods of patient recruitment for cardiovascular disease

3. Common mistakes in digital patient recruitment

4. Our approach to digital patient recruitment for cardiovascular disease studies

Organizers of clinical trials for heart diseases for long have struggled finding and retaining the required number of patients to participate in their trials. Recent studies suggest, that recruitment for heart trials is often more difficult then for other indications. This is particularly concerning as heart disease is the leading cause of deaths worldwide; this represented over 30% of all global deaths.

This blog explains how to overcome these barriers to patient recruitment for cardiovascular diseases in 3 steps:

1. The need to understand the different barriers to participation for different patient populations with cardiovascular disease

2. The 4 main barriers to patient recruitment as cited from recent studies

3. Overcoming the barriers to cardiovascular disease patient recruitment and retention

In this blog, Agata Jasinska, our Senior Online Marketing Manager within Clariness’ Patient Marketing team, shares some of her team’s core focuses to ensure Clariness and others use social media in the right way for patient recruitment, to drive positive engagements and refer high quality patients. Her team’s focuses include:

1. Developing a deep patient population understanding
2. Using inclusive language and imagery
3. Leveraging and testing multiple channels
4. Optimizing campaign performance through data

In this interview series for ClinLife’s Clinical Trial Portal and Patient Blog, we give patients and the public an insight in the world of clinical trials through the eyes of the scientists who design and implement clinical trials. We speak with individual researchers, trial managers and organizers about their work, how did they got involved in clinical research and what drives them in their day to day work. In this interview Dr. Laura Blauth, music therapist and clinical trial manager in Würzburg (Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaften Würzburg-Schweinfurt) tells about her work and music therapy trial for dementia.

Having supported 10+ international Alzheimer’s disease clinical trials, from early to late stage conditions, we have gained a thorough understanding of the barriers different Alzheimer’s patient populations face and have the knowledge of how to overcome these using new targeting and outreach techniques, developing more educational study materials, and additional services.

In this blog, we share the 3 biggest barriers to recruiting patients with Alzheimer’s disease and how we overcome them. These barriers include:

1. The dependency of Alzheimer’s patients on caregivers
2. Hesitance to stop taking known / tested medication
3. The digital literacy of mature patients

February is African-American History Month or Black History Month, a tradition that in some form or another dates back to the United States in the 1920s and has since been adopted by countries across the world. As Black civil rights movements, including Black Lives Matters, in recent years have brought increased attention and awareness to a range of injustices, many companies, including Clariness, have increasingly begun to reflect on what can be done to improve equity and inclusion for those who identify as Black or African-American.*[1] With our Mission being “to improve patients’ lives by accelerating the development of new medical therapies,” we are committed to increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in clinical trials by taking a multilevel approach connecting patients, sponsors, and sites on our ClinLife patient portal. By engaging with Black/African-American patients, their communities, and other clinical trial stakeholders, as well as leveraging our 16+ years of experience with qualitative and quantitative data-driven outreach methods, we can connect more Black/African-American patients to clinical trials.

As we enter our third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, stark health inequalities continue to expand globally. In particular, vulnerable, marginalized, and minority communities are faced with greater socioeconomic and health disparity. While tackling these issues requires a multisectoral and multinational approach, we at Clariness reflect on our role in solving the current crisis and how to overcome challenges towards improving health equity through access to new treatments. With our Mission “to improve patients’ lives by accelerating the development of new medical therapies,” we aim to break down barriers to patient recruitment and boost the inclusion of underrepresented communities in clinical trials through thoughtful engagement with patients, their communities, and other clinical trial stakeholders.

Based on 16+ years of experience, we’ve helped with the conceptualizing, setting-up and conducting of data-driven marketing strategies that reduce the overall cost of enrollment for patients with major depressive disorder. We build this strategy based on the study requirements of clients, and use a multichannel approach, combined with patient engagement and an understanding of the involved research centers’ needs and capabilities, to help reach and enroll a diverse group of patients.

In this blog, we discuss how customized digital outreach techniques with the right strategy can reduce enrollment costs for major depressive disorder studies. This includes:

1. Using data to drive cost-efficient digital patient recruitment
2. Targeting and qualifying patients with major depressive disorder
3. The importance of language and localization

Digital patient recruitment is a necessity in an era when over 60% of the world’s population is online. The number as well as the diversity of digital users (i.e age, location, socio-economic background, but also indications) has grown along with ever new social media platforms. This in turn has provided patient recruitment specialists with more data from different sources to continuously evaluate the performance of digital outreach efforts and thereby increase the gain of referrals and randomizations.

At Clariness, we have been leveraging digital channels to recruit across all major therapeutic areas around the globe, and found that social media is consistently providing a high number of referrals and randomizations, in some cases out performing all other digital channels. In this blog, we highlight why social media patient recruitment should be a core channel used in digital patient recruitment.

Michael Stadler, CEO of Clariness leads the panel discussion on clinical innovation, centralized clinical trials and remote oversight monitoring at Clinical Monitoring and Patient Recruitment Retention (CMPRR) Summit in Barcelona 2021.

Watch the panel discussion here.