Choosing Sites That Will Perform

As you know, we are doing an ongoing series right now on how you can consistently choose sites that will perform for you on your research trials. We talked about the baseball analogy. If you don’t remember it, look up our last two videos. I believe the first time I mentioned it was the video on infrastructure. Look it up!

You don’t always hit a home run but professional sites could be bet on to hit more home runs more often than amateurs, or people who are dabbling in research. We’ve already talked about looking for sites that have high degrees of infrastructure, look for sites that have low amounts of bureaucracy. Today we will talk about sites that have direct access to EMR – Electronic Medical Records.

Best Way To Find Patients

I interviewed Felicia Irvin, a full-time Sales and Marketing Director, who looks for patients for research trials. Felicia talked about looking for patients in medical records, looking for patients via social media, geofencing, traditional marketing (radio, TV, newspaper, billboards). She talked about all sorts of ways that she uses to find patients for research trials. But the singular best way we find patients for research trials is by looking directly into a physician’s medical records.

When you do TV, for example, you’re placing an ad and throwing it out there in the universe that’s seen by hundreds of thousands of people, most of which have no interest whatsoever in what you are advertising. So you are putting your ad in front of lots of people but it is wasted on most of them because you’re advertising a high blood pressure trial and most of the people seeing the ad don’t have high blood pressure or don’t meet criteria for your trial. So there is a lot of waste. It’s a wide net but a lot of waste.

The singular best way we find patients for research trials, the most accurate way, is to look directly at the physician’s database. To see a patient with high blood pressure who doesn’t have diabetes, who is on two high blood pressure medicines, who doesn’t have a diagnosis of cancer, who doesn’t have the other co-morbid conditions. It’s the singular, most accurate way we find patients. Now, most sites don’t have direct access to a patient database. Most sites, even if they are working directly with a physician, with a practice, with a patient database, they aren’t accurately querying that database and contacting those patients directly. Most sites are using advertising or they are waiting for the physician to directly asking the patient if they would be interested in participating because that patient happens to be in front of them at that moment in time and they thought about the trial. Or they are waiting for support staff to refer that patient. That is amazingly common in research.