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Every day, patients and families search for hope—often unaware that a life-changing clinical trial may be just out of reach. Why? Because the way we connect patients to clinical trials is fundamentally broken.
Many patients and caregivers are not aware that clinical trials are a treatment option. Nor can they rely on their physicians to provide them with information on clinical trial treatment options due to workload, awareness, and financial disincentives.
In parallel, pharmaceutical companies struggle to find enough of the right patients for a trial, which is crucial to getting new treatments approved. This age-old challenge continues to become harder with diversity requirements, specificity of patient populations, and the ever-increasing number of clinical trials competing for the attention of the same patients.
From both a patient and pharma perspective, connecting patients to clinical trial has been historically hampered by the limitations of today’s recruitment tactics—it’s too hard for patients and families to get an answer to their most pressing question “What treatment options do you have for me?”
The U.S. government’s website for linking patients to studies, clinicaltrials.gov, is a great resource for regulatory disclosure of clinical trial information. But when it comes to connecting patients and families to clinical trials, it doesn’t help answer that question. The website functionality does not provide a way for patients and families to search for trials by eligibility criteria, which means there is no way for them to identify clinical trial treatment options specific to their medical condition.
Pharma and their recruitment-related vendors continue to employ tactics, including outreach campaigns, that target patients being recruited to individual studies. Their approach is one study at a time, which is completely unreasonable for patients and incredibly redundant and wasteful for the trial sponsor. To move to a clinical trial recruitment paradigm that works efficiently for both patients and sponsors requires upending the traditional model and pioneering a new approach.
Condition-Based Matching Provides Answers
Condition-based matching provides patients and their families/caregivers with the treatment options currently available from pharmaceutical companies that match their situation. Instead of repeatedly answering the same questions over and over on single-study pre-screeners, patients and caregivers need to provide their diagnosis, treatment history, stage of disease, genomics, and other key variables only once. Then, condition-based matching can identify relevant clinical trial treatment options.
With condition-based matching, pharma companies can deploy a single website for all clinical trials that both navigates patients to relevant trials and fully pre-qualifies them for those relevant trials. In addition, condition-based matching enables patient advocacy groups to help their patient population identify all relevant treatment options in recruiting trials.
Why Condition-Based Matching is the Preferred Technology Solution
Cost savings, a streamlined approach, and patient access to trials are all benefits of condition-based matching. However, the technology is also superior to the traditional study-by-study model for three key additional reasons: high-quality referrals, inclusivity, and compatibility.
Traditional recruitment models lead you to believe that sponsors need customized pre-screeners to obtain high quality referrals. However, condition-based matching can prescreen to the same granularity and quality without the overhead of creating a new pre-screener for every study. Based on the patient’s answers to the initial set of questions and the resulting potential matching clinical trials, the technology dynamically presents more granular questions to further refine the matching results and achieve full pre-screening qualification for the refined matching trial or trials. Prescreening and matching occur seamlessly within the same process from a user experience perspective. The configurability of the solution allows sponsors to be as stringent or lenient as they wish in qualifying referrals to be sent to their research sites. Condition-based matching thus eliminates the cost and overhead of individual pre-screeners, without sacrificing referral quality.
Because of the high cost of traditional study-at-a-time recruitment methods, which ‘reinvent the wheel’ with websites and pre-screeners for every study, sponsors are forced to only budget recruitment programs for their most promising, lucrative trials. This results in the other trials in their portfolio struggling to enroll patients without recruitment support.
Not only does condition-based matching allow sponsors to include all trials within their portfolio, but it also provides a mechanism for continuous patient engagement. Under the traditional per-study pre-screening model, those patients that fail pre-screening are lost to the sponsor. With condition-based matching, when a patient arrives at the sponsor website as the result of a study-specific advertisement and doesn’t qualify for that study, they are directed to another recruiting study or studies within the sponsor’s portfolio for which they are eligible. Also, patients can sign up to be notified about future trials that might be relevant based on their questionnaire responses, ensuring continuous engagement opportunities and a recruitment registry of patients for all future studies. Thus, condition-based matching maximizes sponsor ROI and ensures there are no dead ends for the patient.
Many sponsors already have recruitment service providers that have broad patient access, effective outreach, and proven site engagement. Condition-based matching integrates fully with these services and tools. It lowers the cost of these services, which no longer need to include the development, approval, and continuous modification of study-specific websites and pre-screeners over time.
Condition-based matching isn’t just a tool; it’s a new paradigm for patient recruitment—one that puts patient needs first by answering the question “What treatment options do you have for me?” In doing so, condition-based matching also transforms the ROI and effectiveness of clinical trial sponsors’ recruitment budgets.
