Introducing the Modern Clinical Trial Marketplace, a new approach to patient recruitment

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by Brandon Li, Co-Founder

Over the last two years, we’ve had a lot of conversations with industry experts and motivated patients about the state of clinical trial recruitment. The general theme is frustration.

  • Patients are fed up with opaque, and disparate trial information.
  • Sites struggle with a lack of access to qualified patients and recruitment tools that don’t integrate.
  • Sponsors are frustrated because they consistently fail to meet recruitment deadlines.

These problems all track to one root cause: there is too much friction in the system.

Patients, sites, and sponsors, the 3 core stakeholders in patient recruitment, all have a strong desire to engage with each other, but struggle to do so because the system is currently set up in such a way that it is painfully difficult. At every step of the recruitment journey, all 3 stakeholders are faced with systemic roadblocks:

  1. Awareness is limited: None of the required stakeholders are able to easily find each other and make the first connection
  2. Enrollment is disjointed: Patients, sites, and sponsors coordinate with each other in a fragmented web of software, call centers, and email chains
  3. Reporting is inconsistent: Strategic decisions are made using ad-hoc data due to a lack of real-time visibility

There needs to be a complete reframing of the patient recruitment journey in clinical research, that addresses these systemic issues.

We would like to introduce a new concept that aims to address these issues and that is specifically designed to ensure that all 3 core stakeholders can interact with each other transparently, quickly and in real time: A Modern Clinical Trial Marketplace (MCTM).

Modern Clinical Trial Marketplace - Patients, Sites and Sponsors connected in a network

A complete reframing of patient recruitment from top-down, vendor-based campaigns to a patient-centric, continuous collaboration platform.

So, what are the defining characteristics of a Modern Clinical Trial Marketplace?

  1. The Marketplace verifiably enrolls patients in trials. This is the ultimate measure of success for patients, sites, and sponsors. A Modern Clinical Trial Marketplace needs to reliably help patients participate in trials and help trials recruit more patients.
  2. The Marketplace is 3-sided. Patients, sites, and sponsors must be able to use the platform independently. And they choose to use it because there is a mutually-reinforcing value proposition driven by the network effect. Patients get access to leading researchers, sites engage new patients, and sponsors recruit their trials faster.
  3. The Marketplace reduces friction with technology. Patients and sites can connect directly. Sponsors can share the merits of their research with patients. Sites and sponsors stay in sync on recruitment progress in real-time. No more broken telephone.

To achieve this, a Modern Clinical Trial Marketplace must become the go-to destination for patients by empowering them to learn about clinical trials in one place. Then, as patients use it, it will become the go-to destination for sites and sponsors as well. The result is that a Modern Clinical Trial Marketplace speeds up recruitment by removing the systemic blockers that typically cause delays, increased site burden, and frustration.

Imagine this:

  • A website that has all clinical trials written in truly patient-friendly language, and that is searchable by disease, treatment, geography and eligibility.
  • It has all the information patients might need to make an informed decision, presented in an easy to consume way - phase, timelines, safety indicators, efficacy from prior results etc.
  • A site portal that only requires a login, and no integrations, where researchers can see all the patients who are actively applying to their sites, as well as all their eligibility info and can engage with them on the platform seamlessly.
  • An ability for sponsors to see performance across all sites in real time, without any manual work, and to update trial info, pre-screeners and recruitment strategy without any back and forth with a third-party vendor.

That’s what a Modern Clinical Trial Marketplace can do.

We believe that Power will become this Modern Clinical Trial Marketplace.

Continue reading about how a Modern Clinical Trial Marketplace solves sytemic issues in the recruitment journey for patients:

👉 Patient focus: How the Modern Clinical Trial Marketplace solves problems in the patient recruitment journey

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