What You Don't Know About Patient Recruitment Can Impede The Success Of Your Trial

By Tyler Bye, Associate Director, Program Management

You don’t know what you don’t know.

That’s probably true in general, but it’s most certainly the case when it comes to clinical trial recruiting. I learned it the hard way.

I’ve spent my entire professional career in clinical research. I started on the academic medical center site side, and I would say I have a deep understanding of what’s involved in running a study from that perspective. Later, I moved to the sponsor side and learned so much more about planning and executing a trial. But—although I didn’t know it at the time—I’d never truly grasped patient recruitment.

Recruitment is one of the things sites and sponsors just do. Everyone thinks they know what it means. But it’s so much more complicated than they imagine. I remember helping write a clinical trial years ago when I first started out. We were confident: We knew the locations. We understood the disease prevalence. We started the study. We didn’t recruit one single person.