Patient Recruitment: A Critical Component Often Overlooked, Making It The Regrettable Spend

By Mark Wade, Global Practice Leader, TransPerfect Life Sciences

The patient recruitment (PR) and retention market is forecasted to be $5.3 billion by 2030, which explains why sponsors and standalone PR companies are focused on removing as much of this bottleneck as possible during the pre-site start up period.

Every aspect of a clinical study has a bottleneck and a loss of opportunity cost associated with it. Clinical services have to compound a study drug and package it, labeling it in accordance with strict notified body directives. Enrollment of patients and randomization is also a time-consuming process with Electronic Data Capture (EDC), as well as Clinical Outcome Assessment (COA) tools and translation. But one of the biggest and most often overlooked aspects of a study is that of PR.

To better understand the dynamics of PR we need to look at the patients’ behavior drivers.