[by: Laurie Briones]
Leads are the lifeblood of any clinical trial site. Potential volunteers have taken the time to submit their information and are expecting a callback. Your enrollment goals hinge on your site’s ability to be able to contact those leads ASAP while the interest is still high. None of this means anything if you do not have the right support team in place to do this. Are you throwing your marketing dollars down the drain? Let’s look at some simple changes you can make NOW to get your patient recruitment back on track.
CRCs and Recruiting
Is a CRC the best person to recruit? Yes, of course. Do they have the time to see patients and recruit successfully? Not always. If a CRC is handling recruitment, they are calling and responding when they have time, not necessarily at the best time. In most cases, they are phone screening a candidate for one particular study, not necessarily for other current or future opportunities.
When you have a dedicated recruiter, even part-time, you have someone that can be trained to identify possible candidates for enrolling studies and build your database for future studies. Gathering a full health and demographic profile for a candidate whether they look like a good fit or not means you are adding to a database you can refer to for future studies. A healthy database means less money spent on advertising down the line.
Simple Standards
So, you spend the money, and now the leads are coming in. How soon should you call them, and how many times? Most of the data we have relates to sales calls. Although patient recruitment is a far cry from a sales call, we can still see that response time and appropriate follow up are a top factor in reaching patients.
A new lead should be called as soon as you are able. Studies show that interest decreases by almost 400% after the first 10 minutes pass. For patient recruitment, it should be reasonable to get to new leads within an hour, and all new leads called before you leave for the day.
Leads should also be contacted a minimum of 4 times with a text or email attached to each attempt (call + text, call + email, etc.). This gives the applicant plenty of ways to respond, making sure priority is given to responses.
IB-RECRUIT
Patient recruitment is hard enough as it is, with much of it being out of your control. Therefore, it is so vital to take control of what you can to give your site the best shot at meeting your enrollment goals.
Did you know that ImageBloom has a recruitment team? IB-RECRUIT can serve as your outsourced team to handle recruitment for all the studies at your location, or on an as-needed basis. If you are overwhelmed with leads and need a quick turnaround, let us help you.
To learn more about IB-RECRUIT, marketing, or website development, call us at (866) YES-BLOOM (2566), or click here.
Reference:
https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/best-times-to-connect-with-leads-infographic
