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I’m a believer that if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got. I seem to be in a minority in this belief within the clinical trials industry, though, as the same old patient recruitment tactics get wheeled out for every new trial.

I think the reason for this is a fear of doing something that strays outside the type of strict conduct necessary for successful clinical research. But that’s where I suggest there’s a fundamental error being made.

To my mind patient recruitment is a marketing activity, not a clinical one.

Obviously a clinical approach is necessary in the lab. But when it comes to attracting people to participate in the first place, it’s exactly that clinical approach that leads to 90% of trials not recruiting on time.

And it’s this fundamental shift in mindset – from clinical to marketing – that helps enable the development of more creative approaches to the problems of patient recruitment.

Recruiting patients into clinical trials is one of – if not the – biggest problems facing the life sciences industry.

Given that clinical trials are the mechanism by which potential treatments are approved to be released for sale, and obviously this is a multi-billion dollar industry, why is it that patient recruitment is such a big problem? Well, in my experience, there are 3 main areas that cause the issues:

Firstly Awareness – or more accurately, lack of awareness that trials exist.

Secondly Access – again, more accurately, lack of access, with large populations of potential trial participants not being able to attend a suitable venue to take part in a trial.

And Thirdly Complexity – over time trials have become more complex, with multiple endpoints and increasingly restrictive inclusion/exclusion criteria.

On top of these, in the next video I’ll introduce a fundamental mindset shift that I believe is required in order to tackle these problems.