Reservations Held By Referring Physicians In Clinical Trials

Some physicians are reluctant to participate in clinical trials as a referring physician. This is a huge issue because a large portion of participants can come directly from a referring physician’s office.

Referring physicians hesitate to get involved in research for several reasons. One of the main reasons is that they may be afraid they will lose their patients to the investigator physician who will be giving them medical attention during the study. Many physicians who are not regularly involved in clinical research don’t fully understand the importance of the specific research being done and therefore don’t care to promote it (similar to any other member of the research team). Finally, referring physicians, especially PCPs, do not have clinical research on their radar; general awareness of research is lacking because it does not command their attention as much as their other tasks.

Seeking solutions for these issues, we spoke with Christina Norris, VP of Clinical Operations at Benchworks and specialist in planning, developing and executing patient recruitment programs for clinical trials.