Benchmarking Patient Recruitment and Retention Practices

Patient recruitment and retention continue to present challenges in conducting clinical trials. The objectives of the study were to benchmark patient recruitment and retention practices across recent global clinical trials from a working group of biopharmaceutical companies and to re-visit the results from an earlier study published 7 years ago. The data collection focused on patient and site enrollment metrics and recruitment and retention tactics used for studies. Analyses were conducted comparing the results from 2012 and 2019. The results indicated that more studies met or exceeded planned enrollment than the previous research and global differences were observed in the present study for site activation rates and target to actual enrollment rates. Since an updated set of recruitment and retention tactics were evaluated in the present study, no comparisons were made to previous data. Researchers suggest further study that would examine usage and effectiveness of specific recruitment and retention tactics across global studies.