Are you struggling to complete your clinical trials? Here are tips from Serva tips for improving patient retention in clinical trials.

Patient retention in clinical trials is one of the most challenging aspects faced by sponsors, and research has shown that most people who enroll in a study don’t complete it. This raises a question: What could have caused this?

When a participant drops out of a study, the time spent identifying, consenting, screening, and enrolling them is wasted.

The average trial already faces delays of 1-6 months because of recruitment shortages.

Losing one-quarter of the patients who enroll can cause trial timelines to stretch out even longer and can cost sponsors a significant amount of money in a day, which could be counted as a loss for them.

If you genuinely want to make clinical trials more efficient, you need to think about how to increase participant retention.

To do that, you should look at the most common reasons patients drop out of trials, such as:

• Inconvenient study visits
• Lack of belief in the trial’s benefits
• The feeling that they are undervalued or unimportant

Let’s delve into understanding how Serva tips help to improve patients’ retention in clinical trials.

More Convenient Study Visits

When patients were asked why they dropped out of clinical trials, one of the top reasons was the location of the study center.

Another survey asked all clinical trial participants, both those who dropped out and those who completed the trial, what aspects of the trial were most burdensome. The top three responses were: Traveling to the study clinic, diagnostic tests, and the length of study visits.

However, sponsors can increase patient retention in clinical trials by utilizing decentralized methods that allow patients to participate from home or a more convenient location. The industry can make study visits more convenient by embracing patient-facing technology and scheduling home visits.

The Benefits of Patient-Facing Technology

Technology can alleviate this burden by enabling patients to submit study data from home and reducing the need for travel to the site. When asked whether they would be willing to use technology during a trial, most patients were comfortable using a computer to enter study data, as well as many were comfortable using a wearable device; eighty-six percent were also comfortable with video conferencing.

These numbers suggest that most patients are open to the idea of technology if it’s intuitive and allows them to travel less.

And when nearly half of the patients find traveling to the study clinic very burdensome, cutting back on even a few visits can make a difference for patient retention in clinical trials.

For more on how research sites can help patients use clinical trial technology, you can check out the Serva guide to patient engagement tech.

But some patients are uncomfortable with tech, and others don’t have Wi-Fi access at home. For those patients, home visits or visits to community sites can prove more convenient.

Scheduling Home Visits

According to research, ninety percent of participants stated that having choices for where they conduct their study visits was somewhat or very important to them.

And when participants who completed the trial were asked what features were most convenient for them, participants gave “having study visits with flexible times” as one of their top three answers.

Serva’s health is one way to make study visits more flexible and give patients choices. Not every patient will want a nurse to visit their home, but for older patients, those with disabilities, or caregivers, Serva health can be far more convenient than constant site visits.

Their 24/7 nurse call center is built for purpose, proprietary, patient-facing CRM technology to deliver outstanding results to the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies and CROs.

While some patients welcome home health care, others may prefer to maintain their privacy and avoid having nurses in their home. This is where their sites can help increase patient retention in clinical trials.

How Participants Can Help Other Patients

Some of the clinical trial participants wanted to advance the science and treatment of their disease condition, while some wanted to save or improve the lives of other patients with their condition.

Some of the participants may still decide not to continue the trial, or the side effects of the treatment are too much for them, but if participants understand that the trial may advance the treatment of their disease, even if it doesn’t help them personally, they may be more likely to get still involved.

Regular Updates and Participant Engagement

Sending participants an update on the trial’s progress via email or text is a simple gesture, but it can make a significant difference.

For example, during one trial, the researchers emailed a one-page study update to some participants and didn’t send an update to the others. Participants who received the update were few, but they were more likely to complete their study tasks afterward.

Many participants believed they always wanted to receive the results of their clinical research study in plain, easy-to-understand language.

Participants crave communication and information about how they’ve helped other patients.

Participants Should Be Carried Along and Valued

If the clinical research industry wants to improve patient retention in clinical trials, it needs to treat patients like partners. A UK survey showed that almost one-fourth of clinical trial participants still fear being treated as if they don’t matter.

The fear of mistreatment is extreme among Black patients, with forty-seven percent expressing concern about past events where trial participants were abused.

Strategies To Help Participants Feel Valued

Throughout the trial, patients crave frequent communication and updates from clinical research staff. Sites that had better patient retention used strategies like:

• Ensuring staff are well-trained, organized, persistent, and communicate well
• Adding “personal touches” to visits and communication
• Treating the participant with respect
• Being considerate of the patient’s time

Identifying challenges the participant is facing and helping the participant address them with the help of training can help clinical research professionals avoid unconscious bias when interacting with participants.

Conclusion

Patient engagement is vital for clinical trial success, impacting everything from recruitment to advocacy. To recruit more diverse patients, a wider pool of patients’ needs to be engaged in clinical research as a concept which means more public education drives are needed.

Patients must have their mental health looked after throughout the clinical journey to engage fully with trial protocols and not drop out, and there needs to be a deeper understanding and willingness as an industry to engage patients with existing mental health conditions.

Above all, effective communication end-to-end is vital in ensuring patients are engaged, and this is important when face-to-face contact is reduced in the case of virtual trials, where technologies replace real-life interactions in many scenarios.