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:

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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.

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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.

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One rejection discourages further participation

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

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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
Learn About Patient Recruitment Strategies ›

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.

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