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.