New capability provides sponsors and CROs holistic view of sites' patient recruitment progress

COLUMBIA, Md., July 24, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Advarra, the market leader in regulatory review solutions and clinical research technology for sites and sponsors, today announced new functionality to centralize all patient recruitment activities into a single view. Advarra's novel recruitment oversight capabilities in Longboat bring together patient recruitment planning, pre-screening, referral sources, and workflow tools to provide real-time visibility into recruitment progress. This new capability addresses one of the research industry's primary roadblocks to trial execution: managing the patient recruitment workflow for sponsors, contract research organizations (CROs), and sites. Early use shows that clinical trials utilizing Longboat are 27% more likely to achieve recruitment goals.

Meeting patient enrollment targets is critical, often demanding multiple recruitment sources. From trial matching tools to data-guided products plus sites' internal systems, the number of ways the research industry connects patients to clinical trials continues to grow rapidly. In fact, Advarra's 2023 Study Activation Survey reports that more than three quarters of sites are offered patient referrals from a variety of sources in at least 25% of their studies. And, when offered referrals, 40% say they work with more than one recruitment resource on a single study. As a result, there is no single source of information on the progress of patient recruitment, while already strained sites are burdened juggling various tools with no clear line-of-site on status.

Longboat's new patient recruitment oversight capability pulls this disparate recruitment information into a comprehensive dashboard, providing all stakeholders insight to the progress of recruiting activities, reducing the site's burden and creating trial efficiency. 

"Successful patient recruitment is critical to running trials, so sponsors and CROs must carefully oversee how recruitment efforts are progressing, but it's difficult when there are so many different sources of information," said Karen McIntyre, Parexel's Vice President, Global Site Alliances. "Sites get frustrated when they are interrupted by endless calls asking for updates. With Longboat's patient recruitment functionality, every stakeholder has real-time visibility and a holistic view of progress without chasing information. In a few clicks, everyone is updated. It eliminates a major barrier to speed."

Longboat also provides a site-specific recruitment planning tool to align the strategy between sites and sponsors/CROs as well as an Interactive Response Technology (IRT) integration to provide visibility on the entire patient funnel, from initial patient pre-screen and enrollment, to creating and sending 'thank you' letters to all study participants at the conclusion of the trial. The aggregation of this functionality into a single tool with drill-down dashboards alerts study teams to recruitment issues sooner so they can course-correct faster – significant, given that patient recruitment is the single biggest cause of trial delays. About 80% of trials fail to meet initial patient enrollment goals, and these delays can result in lost revenue of as much as U.S. $500,000 per day. In fact, on average, 20% - 50% of trials will require rescue sites to cure unmet enrollment targets, increasing costs and delaying milestones.

"Patient recruitment remains one of the greatest challenges to study timelines, and the supplemental recruitment solutions offered to accelerate recruitment have been notoriously disjointed causing inefficiencies for sites, sponsors, and CROs," said Elisa Cascade, Advarra's Chief Product Officer. "Longboat consolidates all the different streams of recruitment activities and status updates into a simple, single real-time view. By removing friction from one of research's biggest pain points, Longboat improves collaboration between sites, sponsors and CROs which can accelerate trial timelines."

Utilized in over 500 studies in the past four years, Longboat streamlines clinical research by connecting all stakeholders – sites, sponsors, and patients – to centralize and simplify trials and deliver a better clinical research experience for all. Advarra's new Longboat patient recruitment oversight capability comes just months after launching single sign-on (SSO) functionality, empowering sites to use their own site-sanctioned credentials to access key systems including sponsor-provided technology. Advarra introduced the SSO innovation to alleviate site burden where nearly 70% of respondents report using six or more logins per study.

Additional Information

• Learn more about Advarra's new patient recruitment functionality in Longboat.
• Learn more about Advarra's site-specific clinical trial technology: www.advarra.com/solutions-for/clinical-trial-sites/
• Connect with Advarra on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/advarra

About Advarra
Advarra breaks the silos that impede clinical research, aligning patients, sites, sponsors, and CROs in a connected ecosystem to accelerate trials. Advarra is number one in research review services, site and sponsor technology, and clinical trial experience software, and is trusted by the top 50 global biopharma sponsors, top 20 CROs, and 50,000 site investigators worldwide. Advarra solutions enable collaboration, transparency, and speed needed to optimize trial operations, ensure patient safety and engagement, and reimagine clinical research while improving compliance. For more information, visit advarra.com.  

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SOURCE Advarra