Meeting clinical recruitment milestones in an academic center: a data-driven, visual approach

Describing the development of a visual dashboard leveraging available tools for efficient recruitment for patient centered clinical trials in resource constrained settings.

A real-time, visual dashboard was developed, facilitating interactive visualizations, detailed analyses, and data quality control. Daily automated REDCap data retrieval occurred via an R program using REDCap API and output was integrated into Power BI. An interrupted time series analysis was conducted evaluating effects of dashboard on clinical trial recruitment metrics.

The visual dashboard displayed key recruitment metrics, including individual participant progression and recruitment trends over time. Interrupted time series analysis showed improvements in screening rates upon implementation. The mean time to study completion decreased by 19 days following implementation.

Customizable metrics offer comprehensive view of recruitment data and granularity, identifying actionable issues, enhancing study timeliness and completion.

Clinical trials of all budgets can integrate dashboards for real-time monitoring and data driven improvements to promote more timely completion.