Running an Internal or Family Medicine Clinical Trial? You Won’t Enroll Patients Unless You Do These 3 Things

25% of American adults don’t have a primary care provider.¹ What’s worse, about 20% also haven’t seen any doctors at all in the past year.² Since most patients first go to their healthcare provider for clinical trial information, these statistics don’t bode well for internal or family medicine clinical trial enrollment.³  

How can you efficiently fill your trial if patients aren’t seeing their doctors and hearing about research? You need to be absolutely sure you’re reaching the 75% of American adults who do have a primary care provider — here’s how.  

1) Start With the Patient  

In traditional enrollment, you select sites and then search for patients. But, as everyone has experienced, this method is often unsuccessful. To reach your enrollment goals, you need to start with the patient by using Elligo Health Research’s PatientSelect^® model.  

PatientSelect identifies patients that fit your trial’s inclusion/exclusion criteria and then connects with them through their trusted providers, optimizing engagement and overcoming enrollment challenges. Here’s how it works:  

1. Elligo searches complete medical record data from more than 115 hospitals and major health systems, 200 healthcare-based sites, and 100 research-based sites to identify ideal patients for your trial.  
2. AI-powered analysis combs through these millions of untapped patients and determines the best intersection for access. 
3. Elligo experts review the best candidates and connect with their trusted physicians, who then invite them to participate. 

By making recruitment and engagement an extension of the existing patient-physician relationship, PatientSelect enables efficient enrollment and keeps the focus on the patient.  

2) Work With Healthcare-First Sites  

Another way to be sure you’re reaching the 75% of American adults who do have a primary care provider is to work directly with primary care providers.  

In Elligo’s PatientSelect model, research experts connect with pharmacies, hospitals, and doctor’s offices in which patients routinely seek care, form relationships with these facilities, and enable them to participate in research by providing integrated technology and thorough training. This model allows patients to take part in clinical trials with their trusted physicians and in their communities — creating a comfortable study experience that is much more attractive to potential participants than traditional trials.  

If your patient requirements are less complex, you can connect with elite research sites and increase your patient pool through Elligo’s SiteSelect model. Offering direct access to 500+ of the very best sites across the nation, SiteSelect streamlines trial placement for internal and family medicine trials.  

3) Prioritize Patient Engagement & Retention  

To attract and enroll more patients in your internal or family medicine trial, you must also focus on patient experience. After all, no one will want to participate in your study if it puts too much strain or stress on daily life. Elligo’s Study-Level Services make it easy to prioritize patient centricity with solutions like Patient Recruitment & Engagement Support and Patient Travel.  

Patient Recruitment & Engagement Support offers everything from study materials development and email outreach to remote consent facilitation to attract and engage patients throughout the trial life cycle, while Patient Travel provides concierge-level travel coordination, reimbursements, and stipend management to increase patient centricity and support study completion. Together, these solutions help you exceed enrollment goals and optimize retention.  

Efficient Internal or Family Medicine Clinical Trial Enrollment  

Elligo is the ideal partner for your internal or family medicine clinical trial. From our PatientSelect and SiteSelect models to our Study-Level Services, our solutions will help you reach, enroll, and retain American adults who do have a primary care provider — making your study run smoothly from beginning to end.  

Contact our experts today to get started.  

Resources  

1. Ducharme, J. Long Waits, Short Appointments, Huge Bills: U.S. Health Care Is Causing Patient Burnout. Time. Published 2023 Feb. 27.  

2. Ambulatory Care Use and Physician office visits. National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Accessed 2024 Jan. 3. 

3. HINTS Briefs Number 48. National Cancer Institute: Division of Cancer Control & Population Sciences. Published 2022 June.