Increasing Participation in Clinical Trials

Effective Strategies

Obtaining participants for clinical trials is difficult for most companies due to a lack of program awareness or logistics problems, preventing participation. According to Mapstone, Elbourne, and Roberts (2007), “patients miss out on opportunities for novel treatment approaches — and beneficial new therapies take longer to reach the public.” For these reasons, creating effective strategies for recruiting participants in clinical trials is vital to increasing the efficiency of drug therapy testing.

In a study of 15 eligible trials, that included 33,719 participants, it was found that the only effective strategies were those that offered some monetary incentive (Mapstone J., 2007). However, these monetary incentives were far from being effective in terms of solving the issue of shortages in participants. It is likely that advertising is not sufficient in clinical trials and increased exposure in the media could create a greater volume of participants (Mapstone J., 2007).

One method which could be used is to advertise using more mass media approaches. Although this method would significantly increase the cost of the trial it would reduce the time to bring medications to market. This method could be used with less cost if companies were to pull resources and create information channels such as a website in which all current clinical trials are running. For those without internet access, a brochure could be designed which contains the the same contact information as listed on the website. Rather than advertising each trial individually, one website could be advertised. This method would significantly reduce cost by pulling resources of different companies.

References

Mapstone J., E. D. (2007, April 18). Strategies to improve recruitment to research studies. Cochrane Database Syst Rev.