Last week, we gave insights into the power of patient engagement and how to integrate engagement into your own clinical trial strategy to increase patient retention and profitability for future trials. Today, we will dive deeper into why patients are dropping out of clinical trials and how you can reduce dropout rates to achieve better recruitment results.
Why are patients dropping out of clinical trials?
Up to 57% of patients randomized to a clinical trial drop out of the study. One of the main reasons for that is unclear expectations due to confusing protocol language, which leads to discouragement and a lack of knowledge of what to expect. Lack of appreciation is another reason why patients drop out - people do not feel like an individual contributor to the better cause but more like a number, which leads to dissatisfaction and lack of purpose.
Of course, some patients also drop out because they feel like the study is inconvenient for their own schedule or forget meetings. Clinical trials are a time commitment that patients should be properly informed about before they are being enrolled. No matter what the reason for dropouts, research sites need to pinpoint potential burdens for patients throughout the recruitment and clinical trial funnel and proactively reduce them to keep as many patients as possible in the trial. But how can you do this? Let’s take a look:
How to keep your patients engaged throughout the trial experience
Decreasing dropout rates in your clinical trial practice is a crucial success factor to improve your recruitment results. We have created Citrus to provide a solution to this challenge. The main reasons for dropout rates evolve around a lack of information and engagement. It is therefore essential to connect with their patients in a meaningful way by increasing touchpoints to generate information, create transparency, send reminders and messages, and answer questions. By doing so, your patients will feel like a valuable part of the process and can develop trust towards an unknown topic of medical research.
Citrus offers automated, personalized campaigns, as well as a centralized communication hub and an integrated patient portal that makes connecting with patients a breeze. Patients can receive further insights into their clinical trial on the patient portal and see when their next visits are, so always stay up to date.
Using advanced reporting for in-depth patient insights
Besides increasing patient touchpoints and implementing essential interactions within your workflow, using data points and advanced reporting can also help you to reduce dropout rates. Many clinical trials do not know why patients decide to leave a clinical trial. With Citrus’ advanced reporting feature, you can not only develop action plans based on data points but also collect valuable patient insights and feedback through surveys and campaigns. This allows your site to proactively tackle burdens and challenges patients experience ahead of time and thus avoid dropout rates due to for example unfriendly staff experiences, inconvenience, or lack of expectations.
Does this sound interesting to you? Learn more about Citrus here.
Partner with accredited companies
Since 2015, our team has been hard at work raising awareness of clinical trials across the globe. A Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ company and a graduate of the renowned Techstar program in New York, Citruslabs is at the forefront of patient recruitment and retention technologies. With over 3 million patients now recorded on our databases, our patient recruitment dashboard is fast becoming the most efficient method of trial recruitment.
Now a #1 health app in 17 countries, our Mindmate app is helping to revolutionize the way we think about healthcare. Mindmate “[takes] senior care into the digital age” (Forbes, 2018) by providing people with the cognitive decline the essential tools to help them rebuild and maintain strong mental health. Trusted by millions of users, our health community continues to grow as the content available expands to the needs of individuals today.
With more than 200 research sites now using the Citrus platform to screen thousands of patients every month, researchers are now well on their way to finding new treatments for hundreds of different health conditions - something that just would not be possible without a technological solution. Make sure that your clinical trial is in the lucky 12% and turn that luck into guaranteed results with Citrus.
Still a little unsure? Check out what our customers have to say about us here.
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