How To Eliminate Site & Patient Phone Tag…And Increase Recruitment
By Ed Miseta, Chief Editor, Clinical Leader
According to Joe Kim, Senior Advisor, Clinical Development Innovation for Eli Lilly and Company, there are two types of innovation. There are those innovations that are giant leaps forward where the intent is to go out and do something different that’s totally new and different. And then there are those innovations that are so simple and obvious that you’re surprised no one thought of it before you. Within Lilly, Kim remembers not to forget about the second kind.
When looking around for ways to innovate the clinical trial process, he often attempts to focus on the small changes that can make a big difference in the conduct of trials. One such area is the phone tag that can take place between sites and patients.
“There is a lot of innovation happening around patient recruitment,” says Kim. “We hear a lot of innovation around using electronic health records (EHRs) to find patients and mobile devices to engage patients. Some are using pharmacies like Walgreens as clinics and even reaching out to patients via social media. But all these really great whiz-bang ideas, tools, and tactics often end up in the same place…and that is in a game of phone tag that pushes people away. The patient ends up getting messages from the site, and the site ends up getting lots of messages from the patient. This creates a terrible bottleneck.”
Sponsors, Sites, And Patients All Suffer
Despite the issues that arise from all these phone messages, Kim believes there is reason to be hopeful. Lilly recently enrolled a study that Kim refers to as a grand slam. The company was able to complete recruitment seven months ahead of schedule and 56 percent of the patients came from outside channels. That’s good news. But even in that success story, they lost 40 percent of the patient recruitment efforts because of some form of phone tag. He imagines how much more successful the effort could have been had the game of tag been eliminated.
“It’s not just the sponsors that suffer,” he says. “The sites and patients suffer too. Sites reported spending 37% of their patient engagement time leaving and retrieving messages, which is time that is then taken away from more important patient needs, such as face-to-face meetings with patients that actually drive research productivity. It ends up being a huge waste of time and it is frustrating to the patients.”
Lilly knew this was a problem they had to solve for everyone involved in the process. The company set out to identify a technology that could be put in place to alleviate the bottleneck. He knew a key to success was understanding site workflow. He also knew sites interacted with patients in a variety of ways. By working with several sites and Yuzu Labs, Lilly was able to create a vision for a self-scheduling model to eliminate the phone tag for patients and return all of those wasted hours to site staff. The model is similar to Open Table.
Find A Site, Schedule A Time
“The way Open Table works is that you select a restaurant you want to visit and state what time you plan to arrive, and pick a table” notes Kim. “When you arrive at the restaurant, there is a table waiting for you. You get your table with no wait, the restaurant gets your business, and there is no phone tag that has to take place between the restaurant and the customer. We felt that same model could be used to schedule initial patient contacts at sites.”
The system Lilly helped to create with Yuzu Labs is called Site Connect and it appears to be poised to solve the phone tag/voicemail problem. According to Kim, the system allows patients to schedule an initial call at a convenient time for both the patient and the site, which allows sites to spend their time doing things that actually generate revenue and drive patient satisfaction. This ends up being a win-win situation for sponsors, sites and patients.
For example, a patient can now look up a study, find locations, and select a location of interest. The patient can get the information needed to contact the site, or simply schedule the initial contact by selecting a day and time.
“Our hope is to eventually eliminate these games of tag,” states Kim. “There is still a lot more to do. eConsent is something that a lot of people are trying out, and this could be integrated with that technology. An appointment reminder and rescheduling function is something we think may become a part of this as well. We also understand that not every site will participate in this effort. We know we will never have 100 percent participation, and that’s ok. Even if we only have 20 percent of sites onboard a few years from now, that would still be a huge improvement over what we have now.”