Contract research organizations and pharmaceutical sponsors work with marketing clinical trials to reach patients interested in research. From connecting with local doctors to using digital outreach tools, agencies use a range of methods to capture the attention of patients and motivate them to take the next step. If you’re looking for recruitment support for your trial, consider these clinical trial recruitment services and find the best options for your trial.
The clinical trial process is notoriously riddled with delays, most frequently due to missed patient enrollment quotas. But a study published earlier this month in JAMA Network revealed a surprising source of additional delay – the lag time between data collection and publishing trial results.
The JAMA study found that, across 341 studies in six medical journals, the overall median data age was 33.9 months at the time of publication, and the median time from final data collection to publication was 14.8 months. 18.5% of trials required two or more years of publication time; 19.9% required more than four years just to complete enrollment.
Pharmaceutical companies have a long-established process for marketing clinical trials, but the COVID-19 pandemic has massively disrupted the face-to-face patient interactions central to how these companies have traditionally tested new drugs and devices. At the same time, development efforts for COVID-19 diagnostics, therapies, and vaccines have been thrown into overdrive as governments across the world push for solutions at unprecedented speed. In response to these twin forces, pharmaceutical companies have devised new ways of working, accelerated digital adoption, and scaled pilot programs and innovation across their organizations within weeks—far faster than almost anyone could have imagined in early 2020.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made change unavoidable. As pharmaceutical companies prepare themselves for the future, they need to embrace and integrate three elements that will redefine clinical development: virtual first approaches, using real world evidence, and adopting new ways for working.
