Have Front Staff Queue Calls for PIs to Increase Recruitment
Principal investigators, are time constraints keeping you from calling new patients and increasing enrollment in your studies?
Patient recruitment is a pretty specialized field so it’s not something covered a whole lot, which is why I share my knowledge to try and broaden knowledge in this field.
You, as a physician, lend your authority to the study. Calls directly from PIs to new patient referrals is the leading factor in many high enrolling sites. Speaking to a doctor quells concerns and removes the mystery around clinical trials for patients.
When I discover “shortcuts” I like to share them to help all the research sites out there. My goal is to educate PIs and coordinators about different patient recruitment tech niques to help expand the techniques they can use.
Calling patients takes time: dialing, reaching voicemails, and clarifying who you are and what you are calling about. These distractions may only amount to 5 or more minutes each, but added together, it takes away hours of patient visits for the physician.
To eliminate this burden, PIs can have their office staff call first, pre-screen patients, and then transfer the call to you, the PI. By doing this you will speak to only the qualified patients about study-related questions.
If your phone system doesn’t support call transfer, you can look into VoIP systems such as Ring Central or Line2 which make transferring calls easier and more efficient for everyone.
Your staff should be clear that they are transferring the call to the doctor in charge of the study and confirm that questions should be limited to the study. This should help focus the call once it gets to you the PI.
Again, having the PI involved in the early stages of the patient enrollment process helps immensely. It is something we have commonly observed in both small and medium sites that recruit well. One caveat to add, we work with non-oncology based studies, so our observations are limited to those types of studies.
For all non-oncology studies this interaction with you the physician should increase the chances of trial appointment attendance.
Go and test this technique tomorrow! Have your team set up a handful of calls for you to run your own trial and observe the results for yourself!