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Clinical research organizations sometimes create surveys and share general statistics about clinical trial participation. But every patient is different, and overarching stats don't tell the full story.

Today, nearly 60 million patients are needed for currently recruiting clinical trials. And in fact, 80% of trials will be delayed or closed due to difficulty finding patients to take part.

As medications become more targeted and sophisticated, the growing complexity of clinical trial protocols is making it more difficult than ever to find the perfect patients for your trials. That’s why a thoughtful and strategic patient recruitment strategy is key.

While approximately 15 to 20 percent of people 65+ have Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), it can be difficult to identify, and difficult to determine if it is related to Alzheimer’s disease. MCI does not always lead to dementia, but people with MCI are four times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia than those without it — so it’s important to treat this condition ...

A few years ago, we wrote a blog series for ACRP in which we focused on patient centricity in clinical trial design, recruitment, and execution. Over the next few months, we’ll be taking a second look at those blog posts, sharing updated versions on our own blog. Here’s an update to the first in that series.

Living with a chronic illness or other condition can take up a significant piece of a patient's time. Though clinical trials can be beneficial to patients, recruitment efforts have to compete with many other products and services that can offer a patient support.

With patients waiting for new and better treatments and companies waiting for results, delays in clinical trials are far from ideal. And yet, here at Antidote, we receive calls and emails every day from researchers who are missing their trial’s deadlines because they’re having trouble finding patients to take part.

As a clinical trial sponsor, you don't have time to waste. Running a clinical trial for one day can cost up to $37,000 by some estimations. Delays in new treatments hurt patients waiting for better options, too.

Today, study teams have a variety of clinical trial recruitment tools at their disposal to find the right patients for their studies. As anyone involved in the patient recruitment process knows, enrolling patients into studies isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. Complex protocols in particular can make recruiting patients particularly challenging – and make using a varied approach more important.

[Updated June 2019]