Patient Recruitment Architecture
Continuum Clinical
Neil Weisman, President
nweisman@continuumclinical.com
It’s common for sponsors to conduct multiple clinical trials with the same compound and to treat each of these trials as a stand-alone project. But Continuum Clinical’s Patient Recruitment Architecture applies traditional consumer brand concepts to clinical trials, allowing sponsors to develop umbrella study collateral that will unlock efficiencies in time and cost while driving long-term value for multiple stakeholders. The architecture reduces or eliminates redundancies often present in patient recruitment plans by establishing common study elements (such as study branding, naming, websites, and the generation of patient and site materials) at the start of the recruitment effort.
The architecture was challenging to put into place because implementation requires some structural shifts within sponsor organizations. Specifically, this architecture relies on getting sponsors to think of studies as programs instead of individual silos—and to fund them at a program level instead of a trial level. By clearly articulating the benefits as they relate to each stakeholder (from patients to HCPs to almost every study team within a sponsor organization), Continuum Clinical has been able to help sponsors see the value of this strategy and adjust their procedures accordingly.
Continuum Clinical first applied its patient recruitment architecture months ago on an oncology program that has since become one of the largest in the history of clinical trials, supporting more than 400 trials in over 30 different tumor types. In total, Continuum Clinical has implemented its patient recruitment architecture for three sponsors to date and so far it has improved the startup phase by an average of three months for each trial following the establishment of the umbrella branding and materials development.
