Measuring the impact of “e-commerce culture”
By Paul Ivsin
EVP, Trial Engagement Services
One thing we hear a lot lately: clinical trial patient recruitment has a lot to learn from e-commerce platforms like Amazon and OpenTable. Online consumers patients have come to expect one-click convenience and immediate response. A key component of this: sites need to very quickly follow up on referrals to maximize their enrollment.
It is tempting to worry that your trial needs to provide rapid responses to referrals – they’re interested now, and their attention may quickly fade away!
We don’t like leaving these issues to chance. We went to the data.
In MERIS™, we have detailed tracking data on a decade’s worth of enrollment campaigns – we know when the referral came through, the exact time that the site first attempted contact, and whether the referral eventually signed an informed consent and enrolled in the trial.
We posed a simple question: what is the true cost (measured in lost enrolled participants) for each day that a site does not reach out after getting the referral?
Compiling the data across many large outreach programs, we get a very different picture:
Wait! That is not the result we were looking for.
There is no drop off for at least a week! Referrals who are called back by the sites after 3-4 days are just as likely to enroll in the trial as those who get a same- or next-day call.
In fact, even the drop off for referrals that aren’t contacted for over a week is relatively modest. It is only when sites wait longer than two weeks (which is, thankfully, pretty rare) that we see clear evidence of reduced enrollment.
So what’s going on?
First and foremost, the data suggests one clear idea: people don’t make health decisions the same way they make consumer decisions. Changing doctors and switching up your medication regimen is simply not like buying a new water bottle on Amazon.
(It seems obvious when put that way, right?)
And the decision is even bigger for someone considering a clinical trial.
If rapid follow up has little to no benefit for your trial, then any time spent pushing sites to do it is a clear waste of time and resources. But it gets worse: over time, sites will begin to de-prioritize your trial. Most sites do not have extra staff just sitting around, ready to jump on the phone the minute you send over a referral, so your pushiness will not be well-received. Some of them may even realize that the fastest way to make you stop bothering them is to simply mark referrals as unreachable or ineligible.
So what does work?
When talking to sites in our outreach campaigns, our Global Site Solutions team always emphasizes that the quality of their conversation is far more important than the speed of their callback. A coordinator that’s just trying to spin through as many calls as possible as quickly as possible is not going to be nearly as successful as one who takes their time and is prepared to have an unrushed, empathetic conversation – understanding that a trial is a big decision for the patient to make.
Special thanks to Senior Data Analyst Amruta Kulkarni for helping to compile data across multiple studies.
