Solving the $5.3B Patient Recruitment Problem

Author: Mark Wade, Global Practice Leader, TransPerfect Life Sciences

With the patient recruitment market forecasted to reach $5.3 billion by 2030, sponsors can't afford to treat enrollment as an afterthought. Reduce clinical trial delays and regrettable spend with our proven patient recruitment strategies.

patient-recruitment

Challenges in Patient Recruitment

Participant recruitment is constrained by several structural and behavioral bottlenecks that contribute to study delays, including:

  • Icon Analytics 2

Most patients don't know trials exist

88% of participants never discuss their research experience, and 26% of people don't know where trials are conducted.

  • Icon Global Contract

Thousands of trials compete for the same limited participant populations.

Over 60,000 trials are recruiting or have not yet started in the U.S. alone.

  • Icon Progress Bar

One rejection discourages further participation

65% of those who don't qualify for a study don't search for another.

  • Icon QA

Randomization processes and screening introduce high failure rates.

For every 1,000 patients, assuming they don’t have a rare disease, only 10% will actually be randomized.

Why don’t more participants enroll?

61 %

Increase in eligibility criteria

The total number of eligibility criteria for an average Phase III protocol has jumped from 31 to 50 from 2002 to 2012. Source: National Institutes of Health


57 %

Fear side effects

20 %

Fear risks to overall health

13 %

Fear receiving placebo

Planning an AI Strategy

What Works

Successful recruitment programs apply a structured, multi-layered approach rather than relying on a single channel or tactic:

  • Address patient recruitment early, before site activation, rather than treating it as a downstream task
  • Design outreach strategies around real patient behavior and decision patterns
  • Recognize that awareness, eligibility, and enrollment are distinct filtering stages
  • Account for the steep attrition between initial interest and final randomization
  • Treat recruitment as a continuous, measurable process rather than a one-time activity

How TransPerfect Helps

TransPerfect supports patient recruitment through integrated services that address communication, localization, and operational scale across global trials.

  1. Patient-facing content creation and localization to support multilingual outreach
  2. Translation and adaptation of recruitment and study materials
  3. Support for compliant global communications and documentation
  4. Expertise across therapeutic areas and trial phases
Data Security with AI

Your Patient Recruitment Checklist

So how can we maximize our efforts to recruit patients and keep them for the length of the study?

  • Create meaningful, insightful, and informative web landing pages. They must be readily accessible to potential patients, and written in easy-to-understand prose.

  • Patient facing materials must be culturally acceptable. As we recruit patients globally, we must be mindful of the language, culture, and customs of our target market. Insensitivity can do more harm to a brand than good.

  • Any direct mail needs to be created with brevity in mind. Patients receive significant solicitation mail daily. Study information, if not created succinctly, can be dismissed out of hand.

  • Site and Principal Investigator (PI) literature needs to be able to speak to the clinician in a way that appeals to their clinical needs. This is not to be confused with patient-facing materials. Both need to be addressed with a different mindset.

  • Ensure materials are created by teams that understand the disease state primarily. It is not just about graphics and fuzzy animals. The artwork can come later.

  • Ensure that your provider understands more than simply placing social media advertisements. Ensure that there are metrics for success and a methodology to amend and fine-tune the tactic in real time.

  • Have a plan to transport a subject to a site if they are unable to do so on their own. Remove every barrier to enrollment possible.

  • Ensure that there is a plan to retain the subject once the study has begun. Develop a plan to send encouragement and support throughout the entire lifecycle of the study, for years if necessary.

Ready to Recruit Faster and Retain Longer?

Cut enrollment timelines, cost, and reduce dropout rates with targeted patient solutions.

How did you hear about us?
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

Related Resources

Reddit Stories: AI Failures in Clinical Trials

Clinical operations experts react to real AI failure stories pulled directly from Reddit and work backward to identify what should have caught them. From hallucinated citations that passed an initial review to AI-drafted guidance sent to a site without proper oversight, each story raises the same question: What would your team have done? ...

Reddit Stories: AI Failures in Clinical Trials

The Human in the Vault: Building Review Workflows That Satisfy Regulators

AI translation is already fast enough for most teams. The gap is on the review side: who signs off, what gets logged, and whether the process holds up when a regulator asks. This session walks through a real human review workflow within an AI-assisted translation process ...

eConsent: Why the Content Matters as Much as the Tech

Insights from a conversation with Edwin Cohen, Principal Consultant / Owner at C&Flow Instrument Creation and Mark P Wade Global Practice Leader & COA SME, TransPerfect Life Sciences For all the attention paid to the systems, platforms, and integrations behind...

Pragmatic Use Cases for AI in Medical Information

The rapid advancement of AI presents medical information teams with powerful new opportunities to transform their operations. From inquiry intake and intelligent triage to case management and standard response development, AI-driven solutions are already delivering measurable ...

LifeSci Talks COA Series | The "Frankenstein Instrument" Problem: Why Some PRO Measures Don't Fit Today's Patients

Are the COA Instruments we've relied on for decades still measuring what matters to patients today? In this episode, Mark Wade sits down with Kathrin Fischer PhD, Patient-Centered Outcome Strategy Lead at Boehringer Ingelheim and ISOQOL Director-at-Large Term: 2024 – 2027, ...

Has eCOA Lived up to Its Promise? A Retrospective View on the Evolution of Electronic Clinical Outcome Assessments

The Evolution of eCOA: Progress, Challenges, and the Road AheadElectronic clinical outcome assessments (eCOAs) were expected to make paper obsolete by improving data quality, reducing missing data, and enabling decentralized clinical trials.More than two decades later, that...

How a Leading eCOA Provider Cut Timelines by 60% with GlobalLink Strings Integration

Discover how a leading eCOA provider slashed project timelines by 30% and screenshot review cycles by more than 60% by integrating GlobalLink Strings into its platform. This case study breaks down the roadmap, the rollout, and the efficiency gains that followed. See how ...