According to ClinicalTrials.gov, there are over 392,000 research studies in all 50 U.S. States and 220 countries. One of the challenges across disease populations is the overall small numbers of patients that participate in critical clinical trials. Currently, 85% of all clinical trials fail to recruit enough patients, 80% are delayed due to recruitment problems, and dropout rates are high. While trial design is critical, patient engagement, recruitment, and retention initiatives are important not only with patients, but also with caregivers.
While competition is healthy and usually a good thing, competition in clinical trials for a given condition could present significant problems for attracting patients. The goal of any clinical trial is connecting with viable study subjects. It is essential that the goals of the research are integrated with the overall care of the patient. What are some of the general problems? They include:
- Lack of awareness of upcoming and ongoing clinical trials
- Ineffective doctor-to-doctor referrals
- Lack of credible and digestible information
- Eligibility criteria that are too strict
- No integrated patient plan for patient engagement, recruitment, and retention
- Bland/ineffective creative
The Brand Optimization Checklist
Looking for a Brand Optimization Checklist? Every so often, it can be useful to step back and evaluate how well your brand is defined and what, if any...
Read moreSeveral avenues have been developed over the last few years to enable sponsors and Clinical Research Organizations to pursue the correct clinical target audience. These include the use of artificial intelligence, automated recruitment algorithms and methods, and integrated research organizations, to name just a few. It is important to leverage the collective resources amongst all potential sponsor partners to ensure that patients can access and maintain care throughout the trial and beyond.
In addition to the methods and resources above, creating effective and approachable clinical trial naming and branding helps pharmaceutical sponsors and medical device companies strategically yet carefully condition the market for brand development by providing early information and communication in a compelling package.
Naming a trial might appear to be the easy part, but it is, in fact, becoming more and more challenging to develop trial names that are relevant, credible, and unique. Inspiration for a name can come from many places, including ClinicalTrials.gov. If you don’t believe me, look up the TRANSFORM trial. (I’ll save you the effort: as of this writing there are 137 studies either “Active” or “Recruiting”).
That said, the trial name is only a small part of effective trial branding. Six Degrees provides innovative clinical trial branding, as well as patient engagement tools and solutions that empower your clinical research organization partners and clinical sites – ultimately leading to better patient enrollment, retention, and site engagement. When all of that happens, everyone wins!
Our approach applies state-of-the-art knowledge of how people process information, acknowledging that greater than 80% of communication is based on non-verbal information. Our creative ideas, execution, and communication are grounded in strategy built upon targeted patient insights and psycho-sensory research versus an often-times myopic, inside-out perspective.
The resulting development and delivery of branded communication tools and solutions that educate sites, patients, and caregivers help qualify and drive these key targets to trial sites for enrollment. This benefits CRO’s, Sponsors and, most importantly, patients.
Call Six Degrees to discuss this or other healthcare branding topics, and please visit www.six-degrees.com to gather more information.
