Exploring Digital Strategies for Clinical Trial Recruitment

Clinical trial recruitment is an essential step in testing new medical treatments to ensure they're safe and effective. As with any type of recruiting, organizations need to attract and engage the right candidates at the right time. But clinical trial recruitment has higher stakes and is more complex because it involves handling sensitive health information that is both deeply personal and highly regulated.

Digital innovation is transforming the way clinical trial recruitment happens, making it faster, more inclusive, and more efficient. Today's methods can help solve some of the biggest recruiting challenges and speed up the path to medical discovery.

Clinical trials are the foundation for medical advances, so it's crucial that they accurately represent the population who might eventually use the treatment. Having lots of volunteers sounds great, but if they're all from similar backgrounds, the results won't apply broadly. Recruitment challenges , such as low numbers or a lack of diversity, can result in delays, increased costs, weak data, and compromised study quality.

It can be hard to convince eligible people to join. Often, they don't even know trials exist. Logistical barriers like transportation and work schedules also get in the way. And for many, there are deeply personal concerns like skepticism and a lack of trust.

The stats are pretty staggering: 85% percent of clinical trials fail to recruit enough participants on time and within budget. Only about 4% of adults in the United States participate, a rate that hasn't budged since the mid-1990s, and it's even lower among underrepresented communities. Past medical abuses of minority groups created lasting mistrust that researchers are still working to overcome. And without enough participants from a wide range of backgrounds, healthcare providers can't be sure that a treatment will work well for everyone who might need it.

Choosing a recruitment partner is a strategic decision that can help ensure timely, high-quality enrollment and adherence to critical standards. But finding the right one can be daunting, and there are several different types to consider, depending on the size of the organization and specific priorities.

Contract research organizations (CROs) can handle everything from study design to data management, and they often offer recruitment services. Specialized recruitment companies focus exclusively on finding and enrolling patients, while digital recruitment platforms use online tools like clinical trial management software and data analytics to reach potential participants. Each offers different opportunities for boosting enrollment numbers, and selecting a partner is an important decision that depends on the type of support needed.

Here are some factors to consider when evaluating clinical trial recruitment partners:

• Therapeutic specialty: Consider whether you need a partner with therapeutic expertise, such as experience with rare diseases.
• Rescue recruitment: For trials with unexpected recruitment challenges, compare potential partners’ success rates with rescue recruitment and their process for diagnosing and fixing issues.
• Target demographics: Determine whether you need someone with experience recruiting a specific niche population, such as people who speak a particular language or are located somewhere you can't reach.
• Scale: Ensure the potential partner is capable of recruiting for the required scale, such as the ability to recruit for a global trial.
• Strategy: Ask about their marketing strategy, such as a timeline for social media ads and a plan for community engagement.
• Reporting: Find out what they offer in the way of screening and reporting capabilities, including how they pre-qualify patients and their method for sharing data with sponsors.
• Diversity and inclusion: Compare their metrics on diversity and inclusion efforts to ensure the results will be valid and widely applicable.

Recruiting is a huge undertaking, but bringing the right external partners into the mix can help reduce the risk of the trial falling behind schedule or failing altogether because of low enrollment. The partner selected will directly impact a study's success because having enough qualified, representative participants will help give reliable, generalizable results.

Best practices and guidelines have dramatically changed in the centuries since the first controlled clinical trial proved that citrus fruit could ward off scurvy. Researchers have added placebos, minimized bias, and introduced more ethical considerations over time. As societal norms evolve, so do the ways to find participants.

Traditional strategies, such as brochures, newspaper ads, and clinician-patient interactions, have provided a solid foundation. But these methods haven't always been successful in finding enough diverse populations or meeting deadlines. Today, clinical trial investigators are adopting marketing plans for recruitment, including digital-first methods like advertising on social media and finding a defined audience through electronic health record matching. With a modern digital platform like Life Sciences Cloud, for example, sponsors and CROs can identify and retain ideal sites and patients.

A combination of traditional methods and more technology-focused approaches can create multiple touchpoints that nurture participants in their decision-making.

It's all about providing information to the right people at the right time and meeting them where they are — whether that's a library bulletin board or on their favorite app.

With so much potential support available, how do pharmaceutical companies and other organizations decide where to focus? Best practices for recruitment success in the digital age can depend on how familiar a potential participant is with the study. It starts with initial awareness, moving through qualification and engagement, and eventually leading to enrollment.

1. Community-based partnerships and outreach: Collaborate with trusted local organizations, leaders, and clinics that already serve your target communities. This is key to building trust, especially with underrepresented groups. Make sure you're advertising the trial to a diverse population, and dedicate time to researching your institution's reputation in the community. One study on inclusion and diversity in clinical trials found a clear, actionable step you can take: Build community engagement into budgets, timelines, and scopes of work.
2. Social listening: Join online support groups, patient-run blogs, and forums to find out how patients are talking to each other about their conditions. What are their biggest concerns? Do they have certain lingo they use to describe their conditions? Use what you learn to help shape the way you advertise the study and how you talk to potential participants.
3. Digital advertising and hyper-targeting: Use insights gathered from social listening and other methods to create targeted segments and run ads to those segments. However, sponsors and investigators must follow federal guidelines.
4. Online portals: Government databases and research networks allow potential participants to learn about clinical research and find studies that they may be able to join.
5. Patient databases and registries: Patients who have opted into databases such as rare disease registries are easier to find and more likely to be interested in participating in a clinical trial because they're actively seeking support. Plus, these patients can advocate for the clinical trial in their own communities, which provides an additional layer of trust.
6. Electronic Health Record (EHR) integration and real-time eligibility checks: Integrating a CRM like Salesforce with EHR systems can help you check inclusion and exclusion criteria to automatically qualify participants during patient recruitment. This helps you avoid wasting time and resources targeting the wrong people, so you can focus energy on patients who match the study criteria.
7. AI-powered patient matching and insights: By streamlining the process, AI in clinical trials can improve patient matching accuracy and speed. You don't get bogged down by an overwhelming number of potential participants.
8. Chatbots and conversational AI for pre-screening: Agentic AI can take it a step further by engaging with candidates to ask follow-up questions and respond to their questions about the study. The effect is twofold: It can help give candidates all the information they need (adding transparency to the process), and it alleviates workload by pre-screening prospects and instantly passing their information along to coordinators.
9. Site-level engagement automation: When it's time to convert qualified candidates to enrollment, automated engagement, such as email sequences, can help ensure sites follow up quickly while potential participants are aware and interested in the study.

Salesforce can help boost recruitment outcomes in several ways. Using Life Sciences Cloud, it’s possible to speed up clinical trials by managing patient journeys and identifying ideal sites and patients. This helps reduce delays, screen failures, and patient dropouts. The platform's CRM tools make it easier to reach many candidates in a targeted, personalized way. At the same time, agentic AI helps streamline pre-screening, and integration with provider systems and EHRs makes the process even more efficient. Plus, reporting dashboards help track progress and site performance.

Modern recruitment methods can be especially beneficial for recruiting hard-to-reach populations. For example, digital recruitment was essential during the COVID-19 pandemic. One population that's especially hard to reach in person is teenagers — a group that an Australian study described as having “lives are intertwined with digital technologies.” The study concluded that "virtual clinical trial recruitment was found to be low-cost, with the potential to increase trial participation." Social media gave the most bang for buck, as it reached all geographic regions, even those that were considered hard to reach.

The ultimate goal is to make sure patients have access to safe and effective therapies, and clinical trials are crucial to achieving that goal. Leaning on clinical trial recruitment technology doesn't just make the job easier. It helps make clinical trials accessible to a broader population by reaching people who might be overlooked by traditional methods.