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Having looked at the five elements that make up the Magic Wand Index for your patient recruitment solution, the key thing is to actually be able to do something about them. You’re ideally aiming for a solution that is closer to being ‘magic’ than ‘meh’. So, if any of the elements are not scoring around 7 out of 10, you’ll want to review them to see what you can improve.

Of course, with clinical trials, it isn’t always easy to revise the trial operations or protocol, so another thing we can look at to bring the scores closer to being ‘magic’ is the messaging we use to describe them. This isn’t about making things up or lying about what’s involved, more about focusing on the benefits of the solution – for patients or sponsors – rather than necessarily just the mechanics of the process.

The fifth and final element that makes up the Magic Wand Index is for the solution to be Quick. What we’re looking for is the results occuring quickly, and also to see how quickly things start happening. For patients, this will be how quickly they can qualify for the trial, be seen by the research site, and start their participation journey. Another factor will be the length of time they have to remain on the trial – with a shorter period being more attractive than a longer one.

For sponsors, the patient recruitment solution on offer should be as quick as possible to put in place. Plus it should start delivering results quickly, too – ie patients on the trial. Other factors they will consider will be the speed of your responses to them, and how quickly you make any necessary revisions.

The fourth element of the Magic Wand Index is for the process to be Simple. From a patient’s perspective this really means making it as easy as possible for them to participate. The traditional model of a patient having regular visits to a research site can be easy for some people, but not everyone. So, where possible, being able to offer a choice of site visits, home visits, mobile site visits etc can help to make taking part a more Simple process.

For sponsors, a Simple patient recruitment solution is one that provides what they want – patients on the trial – with minimal input from themselves beyond paying for the process. Being able to take a lot of the responsibility for oversight and process management away from the sponsor is helpful for making things Simple.

The third factor for the Magic Wand Index is Return On Investment (ROI). For patients, this will be based on the time and effort that goes into trial participation – the patient burden. Minimizing the disruption to a patient’s life when they are in a trial is a key factor for helping to retain them through to completion. What we’re aiming for is to make the patient consider it worthwhile to be giving up their time as a volunteer in the process.

For sponsors, the Return On Investment can be measured in terms of the resources that they have to put in. A solution that delivers the required number of patients, at a cost that makes sense, and without having to draw on too much time input from the sponsor, is what will make the ROI appealing to them.

The second factor we look at for the Magic Wand Index is the perceived Benefit of moving forward with the solution in question. For patients, this could be a number of things – including getting access to potential treatments before they are released to the general public, doing something of value to the patient community, getting regular health checks outside of your normal healthcare plan, or even simply getting paid to take part – which is sometimes one of the main drivers of participation, especially for phase one trials.

For sponsors, the solution should be able to provide them with patients who will qualify for the trial and stick with it through to completion. Incorporating time and cost saving resources into the service – for instance, by providing a site follow-up mechanism and a user-friendly patient platform with transparent reporting capabilities – could also be seen as beneficial.

The first factor in the Magic Wand Index is Relevance. For patients, we need to make sure the recruitment messaging makes the potential participant feel it relates to them and their circumstances. And just to underline we are talking about the clinical trial participation itself here, rather than the potential treatment – though obviously the two things are closely linked.

For sponsors, the solution has to fit within the parameters of what they want to achieve with their trial. For instance, if the sponsor is looking for 200 patients, and the offer can only realistically provide one or two, it may be that there are more relevant solutions they will consider first.

Also, important for both patients and sponsors, the solution has to fit the target audience. For example, a digital only outreach solution may not be appropriate for populations with low levels of digital competency.

The Magic Wand Index allows us to see if our solution is closer to being ‘magic’, or closer to being ‘meh’. It’s based on 5 factors that we can measure to determine a score for each – the higher the overall score, the closer the solution is to being ‘magic’.

The 5 factors are: Relevance – the solution has to be relevant to the people using it. It has to have a Benefit to those people, and deliver a decent Return On Investment. (Which could be measured in terms of time input, as well as money). The solution has to be based on a Simple process, and be as Quick to achieve results as is possible. In the next 5 videos I’ll look at each of these factors in turn, based on the two perspectives of patient and sponsor.