As part of our Enterprise Trial Solutions, we’re rethinking how sponsors approach clinical trial patient recruitment. In this blog, we dive into how Enrollment at Scale drives faster, more efficient patient enrollment.
In today’s clinical research landscape, one question continues to surface:
Why are sponsors still investing time, budget, and effort into recruiting for individual studies, one by one, within a program?
Running separate screeners, launching isolated campaigns, and allocating media budgets per protocol may feel familiar, but it comes at a cost. Fragmented recruitment strategies slow down timelines, duplicate effort, and drive up the cost per randomized patient.
It’s time for a more efficient approach.
What is “Enrollment at Scale”?
Enrollment at Scale is Clariness’ unified, program-level recruitment strategy designed to support multiple studies through a single, coordinated investment.
Instead of treating each study as a standalone effort, this solution enables sponsors to streamline recruitment across entire study programs, unlocking both operational efficiency and significant cost savings.
With Enrollment at Scale, sponsors can reduce costs by up to 50% per randomized patient while accelerating timelines and improving overall program performance.
How does Enrollment at Scale work?
This model brings multiple studies within a program into a single unified strategy. Instead of running parallel, disconnected recruitment campaigns, all efforts are coordinated through one integrated framework.
Here’s how it works:
- Sponsors provide a program with multiple protocols
- Patients discover studies through a unified marketing campaign
- A single smart screener matches patients to the most suitable study based on protocol-specific criteria
- Conversion is enhanced with further phone screening
- High-quality referrals are generated and sent to sites
This unified approach eliminates competition between studies, optimizes media spend, and ensures that every patient has greater access to clinical research opportunities.
“Enrollment at Scale fundamentally changes how recruitment performs across a program. Instead of limiting reach to a single protocol, you immediately expand your audience and create far more opportunities to match patients – because if someone doesn’t qualify for one study, they can often be routed into another. That dramatically increases the likelihood of finding the right trial for each patient while creating a better user journey that ultimately improves the overall patient experience.
From an operational perspective, it brings everything into one streamlined system. With one funnel and one screener, you reduce setup time, optimize operational resources, and enable treatments to go to market faster. Sites benefit from a single portal and point of contact, and with typically a higher number of eligible patient referrals. Meanwhile, sponsors see faster randomizations as the entire ecosystem works in perfect unity. The result is a more efficient, connected approach that reduces complexity and delivers stronger outcomes across every study in the program.”
~ Janine Hart, Chief Operating & Compliance Officer, Managing Director
Why choose Enrollment at Scale?
By shifting from a study-by-study approach to a program-level strategy, sponsors can unlock measurable advantages:
1. Significant cost savings
Reduce cost per randomized patient by up to 50% through shared infrastructure and optimized media investment.
2. Faster study activation
A unified setup eliminates repetitive processes, enabling quicker study launches across the portfolio.
3. Optimized media efficiency
A single, centralized media strategy prevents self-competition between studies and ensures smarter budget allocation.
4. Full program visibility
Centralized reporting provides a clear, real-time view of performance across all studies, empowering better decision-making.
“From a project management perspective, Enrollment at Scale is ultimately about efficiency, continuity, and smarter decision-making. Instead of clients working with multiple project managers across individual studies, and often with multiple vendors, they have one dedicated team and a single point of contact. That consistency allows us to truly understand their ways of working, build a strong long-term partnership, and significantly streamline communication across the entire program.
What really sets it apart is the level of data visibility and control. Clients have real-time access to performance across the entire portfolio, with the ability to drill down by study, protocol, site, or even specific points in the patient funnel. Rather than relying on manual reporting or fragmented data, everything is available at their fingertips, whether that’s identifying top-performing sites, understanding drop-off reasons, or tracking progress toward randomization targets. We’re not just monitoring performance at a high level; we’re continuously optimizing every layer of the program.
That depth of insight directly translates into better outcomes. By using data to guide decisions, we can improve recruitment quality, accelerate timelines, and support faster delivery of last patient in. And when you consider the cost of delays in clinical trials, that level of efficiency and foresight can ultimately save sponsors millions.”
~ Laura Burt, VP Project Management, Clariness
Does Enrollment at Scale work? A DPN case study
A global sponsor approached Clariness with a common challenge: managing a fragmented diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN) portfolio made up of multiple studies, each with its own recruitment strategy, media spend, and screening process.
This study-by-study approach led to inefficiencies, competition for similar patient populations, and increased costs.
To address this, Clariness implemented Enrollment at Scale, transforming the sponsor’s approach into a unified, program-level recruitment strategy designed to maximize efficiency, reduce costs, and accelerate enrollment.
The challenge:
The sponsor provided three DPN studies under a single program, each with different inclusion and exclusion criteria. Despite targeting similar patient populations, the studies were originally running independently, resulting in:
- Competing recruitment campaigns
- Duplicated media spend
- Inefficient patient allocation
- Limited visibility across the program
Our approach:
Clariness centralized and optimized the entire recruitment strategy:
- Program harmonization: All three studies were aligned under a single, cohesive recruitment framework, integrating both media and operational functions.
- Smart patient routing: We developed advanced smart screeners with triage logic to filter and direct top-of-funnel patients to the most suitable study based on protocol criteria.
- Centralized media strategy: Marketing campaigns were unified to eliminate self-competition between studies, ensuring more efficient use of media budgets.
- Site performance optimization: Our Site Partnership Team rapidly identified and prioritized high-performing sites to improve downstream conversion and maximize return on investment.
The result:
By shifting from a fragmented model to Enrollment at Scale, the sponsor achieved significant, measurable improvements:
- 189% randomizations generated vs. combined study targets
- 50% reduction in media cost per randomized patient vs. single study
- >25% cost savings across the portfolio vs. independently managed recruitment
The takeaway:
This case study demonstrates that Enrollment at Scale is not just a strategic concept, it delivers real-world results. By unifying recruitment efforts across multiple studies, sponsors can reduce costs, eliminate inefficiencies, and significantly outperform enrollment targets – all while making smarter use of their media investments.
Scaling clinical trial recruitment in 2026
Enrollment at Scale represents a fundamental shift, from fragmented execution to strategic orchestration.
For over 20 years, Clariness has supported clinical trial recruitment across 400+ indications, benefiting more than 8,000 sites and contributing to over 42,000 randomizations. By integrating advanced technology, global patient outreach, and operational expertise, we help sponsors simplify recruitment and improve enrollment outcomes.
By thinking beyond studies and adopting a program-wide approach, sponsors can move faster, spend smarter, and deliver stronger results across their clinical development pipeline.
If you are ready to rethink how you approach recruitment, let’s talk.
Author: Mercy Hapsiba, Content Marketing Specialist | Post Date: 27.03.2026