Technology

Through a mix of unique, condition-focused, company-owned web properties and established partnerships, PatientCentra has rapid access to over 20 million opted-in, pre-screened patients with established diagnostic criteria and an openness to finding more information about clinical trials. These proprietary resources give us a head start over others, which we can leverage to rapidly accelerate your trial recruitment right from the beginning, potentially getting programs up and running in less than a month, at lower start-up costs and with pre-recruited, pre-screened patients.

‘Digital’ means many things to many people as there are literally millions of places on the internet where you may find the ‘active’, engaged, protocol-eligible and geographically local patients you seek for your clinical trial; whether from social media, online patient communities, contextually relevant health websites, mobile media/apps, targeted patient databases, intent-based search marketing, targeted e-mail campaigns or drug-targeted media the choices are immense. There is typically not one ‘silver bullet’ within digital that will drive all your patients.

You need a digital specialist with the experience and knowledge to help define an effective digital media plan which focuses in on proven performers. PatientCentra has that experience with more than 70 collective resource years spent driving over one million ‘digital patients’ from more than 50 different digital media into our tailored, patient-centered process.

PatientCentra has developed a unique platform that supports efficient patient recruitment at the program level (i.e. by therapeutic area). With the ability to support multiple studies on one platform and cross-screening of patients at the screener, call center, and/or site level, Sponsors are able to reduce patient acquisition costs, lower set up costs, and achieve a faster time to market while providing a better patient experience. Triage patients for multiple studies one time, and identify the study (or studies) for which they qualify or build a database of patients who don’t qualify for a current study, but may qualify for future studies.

Creating an effective clinical trial patient website (or landing page) that carefully educates and simultaneously helps convince protocol-eligible patients to take action is both an art and a science. PatientCentra combines leading-edge, patient-friendly creative with a data-driven design approach to produce websites that efficiently ‘convert’ a casual visitor to one that takes action. Boosting your website conversion rate by as little as 1-2% can dramatically improve performance. We utilize a 50-point checklist of website features to ensure conversion is maximized and recruitment costs minimized.

One of the biggest mistakes that can be made with centrally-managed patient recruitment programs is not effectively pre-screening potential patients. Sending patient referrals that have not been properly pre-screened is the fastest way to cause sites to become disinterested in a program. Additionally, sites may be spending time with patients who should have been pre-screened out, taking their time and focus away from patients who are protocol-eligible.

PatientCentra understands this challenge, and overcomes it to significantly reduce site screening burden and patient frustration by implementing an effective, efficient patient recruitment continuum. From geographically, demographically, and condition-based patient outreach, through engaging, informing and educating potential patients with study websites and collateral, we consider the patient and site experience every step of the way.

Our two-tiered pre-screening process begins with an easy-to-use, brief questionnaire to pre-qualify patients to progress to a more thorough call center screening. This two-tiered screening process makes it easy for patients (no need to go through an elongated call center screening if they don’t meet high-level criteria), sites (only receive high-quality, thoroughly pre-screened referrals), sponsors (maximizing value by saving time and money).

The end result is engaged, pre-screened, ‘appointment-ready’ patients to optimize the process, as well as the patient journey.

The linchpin technology enabling PatientCentra’s End-to-End Process is our Performance Portal™ Patient Tracking & Management System. This proprietary, purpose-built, web-based portal allows sponsors to track patients (sponsors only see deidentified information) down the funnel from initial website visit to patient inquiry, to online pre-screening, to the call center, to investigator sites, and fully through to enrollment or randomization. With key management and analytical tools at every step, trial personnel can quickly hone in on where in the process patients are being lost or delayed, why that is, and rapidly implement steps to address those situations before patients get frustrated and leave.

The Performance Portal offers discrete tracking capabilities (by site, by media, by trial), a variety of custom reporting capabilities and built-in patient privacy and security protections.

Site Response Monitoring is a perfect example of a technology enabled by the Performance Portal.

Leading research from MIT/Northwestern¹ shows that digital ‘leads’ (e.g. patients) need to be responded to within one day or you significantly hurt your ability to retain them. PatientCentra learned early on that many investigator sites (and occasionally call centers) do not meet this standard, whether due to issues in training, staffing, trial priority, timing or simply focus, causing a major loss of patients in the process.

To address the issue, PatientCentra developed Site Response Monitoring technology which provides sites with a response-enabling solution (click-to-call technology) while simultaneously providing the sponsor with monitoring of site response timing and frequency. Benchmark and other reporting allow rapid identification and intervention with outliers, again avoiding delayed or lost patients in the process, as well as maximizing the sponsor’s investment.

¹ Lead Response Management. New Research Summary. James Oldroyd, PhD, Kellogg School of Mgmt, Northwestern, Sloan School of Mgmt, MIT, 2007 https://content.marketingsherpa.com/heap/DG07SFSlides/LeadResponseManagementReport.pdf