Advarra Centralizes Clinical Trial Patient Recruitment to Enhance Enrollment Efficiency
Advarra has introduced new functionality to centralize patient recruitment activities within its Longboat platform. This enhancement aims to provide sponsors and contract research organizations (CROs) with a comprehensive view of recruitment progress at clinical trial sites, addressing a critical challenge in trial execution.
The newly implemented recruitment oversight capabilities within Longboat integrate various aspects of patient recruitment, including planning, pre-screening, referral sources, and workflow tools. This integration offers real-time visibility into recruitment activities, streamlining the process for sponsors, CROs, and sites. According to early data, trials using Longboat are 27% more likely to meet their recruitment targets.
Meeting patient enrollment goals often necessitates the use of multiple recruitment sources, from trial matching tools to data-guided products and internal systems.
The Advarra 2023 Study Activation Survey revealed that over three-quarters of sites receive patient referrals from various sources in at least 25% of their studies.
Furthermore, 40% of these sites work with multiple recruitment resources for a single study, leading to fragmented information and increased site workload.
Longboat's new dashboard consolidates these disparate recruitment data streams, offering a single, comprehensive view. This functionality reduces the burden on sites by providing stakeholders with up-to-date information on recruitment status, thereby enhancing trial efficiency.
Karen McIntyre, Parexel's Vice President of Global Site Alliances, emphasized the importance of effective patient recruitment oversight. She noted that the Longboat platform allows stakeholders to access real-time progress updates, reducing the need for frequent status inquiries and alleviating site frustrations.
In addition to the centralized dashboard, Longboat includes a site-specific recruitment planning tool to align strategies between sites and sponsors/CROs. It also integrates Interactive Response Technology (IRT) to monitor the entire patient recruitment funnel, from initial pre-screening to sending thank-you letters post-trial. This comprehensive functionality enables study teams to quickly identify and address recruitment issues, which is crucial given that patient recruitment delays are a major cause of trial postponements. Approximately 80% of trials fail to meet initial enrollment goals, leading to significant financial losses.
Elisa Cascade, Advarra's Chief Product Officer, highlighted Longboat's consolidation of recruitment activities:
“Patient recruitment remains one of the greatest challenges to study timelines, and the supplemental recruitment solutions offered to accelerate recruitment have been notoriously disjointed causing inefficiencies for sites, sponsors, and CROs... [...] Longboat consolidates all the different streams of recruitment activities and status updates into a simple, single real-time view. By removing friction from one of research’s biggest pain points, Longboat improves collaboration between sites, sponsors and CROs which can accelerate trial timelines.”
Longboat has been utilized in over 500 studies over the past four years, demonstrating its effectiveness in streamlining clinical research by connecting all stakeholders involved. This new patient recruitment oversight capability follows the recent launch of single sign-on (SSO) functionality, which allows sites to access key systems using site-sanctioned credentials, further reducing site burden.
Topics: HealthTech
