Last week, we gave insights into how Citrus can increase your patient retention rates with a special focus on how automated engagement campaigns can generate trust and transparency for patients, which leads to an increase in retention rates. Today, we will drive deeper into why patient engagement is such a crucial part of clinical trial success and how to integrate higher engagement in your clinical trial infrastructure to meet patient recruitment results and drive profitability for future trials.
Why patient experiences are essential for your clinical trial success?
Clinical trials fail because over 86% are not meeting their patient targets and over 33% of patients drop out during a clinical trial. This has multiple reasons. Firstly, over 50% of Americans are not aware of clinical trials or that they can actually participate in clinical trials without their doctor’s recommendation. At the same time, only 0.5% of all Americans are participating in clinical trials. A reason for this is the fear of the unknown and the lack of expectation management on the side of the trials.
There are many myths about clinical trials. The biggest one is probably that potential candidates think they will be treated like a human guinea pig or something could go wrong during the trial. They do not know what to expect and are being educated on what clinical trials actual are to take that fear. This is why creating a positive patient experience that drives transparency and trust an essential part of clinical trials. Because educated patients that understand the set up of the clinical trial and feel like enough information has been provided to them mean higher enrollment rates and fewer dropouts.
Another challenge is the interactions between research sites and potential study candidates or patients throughout the entire experience. Often, research sites fail to contact patients on time, take too long, call during inconvenient times, or do not call at all. This is also part of the overall patient experience and can drive patients to drop out of a trial if the experience is not pleasant and transparent. Patients need to stay engaged, informed, and up to date about trial developments in order to keep them in clinical trials and meet successful research results.
How can you implement higher patient engagement?
Citrus is a fully integrated recruitment and retention software that fits any clinical trial and makes implementing patient engagement in your clinical trial infrastructure easy. Whether you are already working with CTMS systems or not, Citrus is the perfect add-on to make patient interaction effective.
Citrus supports you and your team to implement patient engagement from the moment a potential study candidate shows interest. The platform enables research staff to set up personalized, automated drip campaigns that engage patients without adding to the already existing workload. Those campaigns can also be tweaked by you to fit the needs and want of your patients and strengthen the site-patient connectivity. This also enables research staff to contact potential patients after 24-48 hours instead of a week, so that they feel like the clinical trial is well organized and trust can be developed.
Besides that, Citrus also offers two-way communication, which enables researchers to stay in contact with patients and answer concerns and questions as soon as possible. Patients are able to communicate with staff via the integrated patient portal, where they can also receive updates and information about the clinical trial.
Do you want to learn more about how Citrus can fit your clinical trial strategy? Contact us here.
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Since 2015, our team has been hard at work raising awareness of clinical trials across the globe. A Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ company and a graduate of the renowned Techstar program in New York, Citruslabs is at the forefront of patient recruitment and retention technologies. With over 3 million patients now recorded on our databases, our patient recruitment dashboard is fast becoming the most efficient method of trial recruitment.
Now a #1 health app in 17 countries, our Mindmate app is helping to revolutionize the way we think about healthcare. Mindmate “[takes] senior care into the digital age” (Forbes, 2018) by providing people with the cognitive decline the essential tools to help them rebuild and maintain strong mental health. Trusted by millions of users, our health community continues to grow as the content available expands to the needs of individuals today.
With more than 200 research sites now using the Citrus platform to screen thousands of patients every month, researchers are now well on their way to finding new treatments for hundreds of different health conditions - something that just would not be possible without a technological solution. Make sure that your clinical trial is in the lucky 12% and turn that luck into guaranteed results with Citrus.
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