Delay no more: Improve patient recruitment and reduce time to market in the pharmaceutical industry

With increasing industry pressure to develop, test and market greater numbers of new drugs faster, pharmaceutical companies need to perform clinical trials as quickly as possible. Inefficient patient recruitment processes will increasingly become a formidable barrier to pharmaceutical companies' success in launching new products. Improving the patient recruitment process is imperative to avoid wasted investments and eliminate costly delays in bringing new drugs to market -- today and even more so in the not-so-distant future.

Patient recruitment is a critical issue as increased industry pressures threaten profits for pharmaceutical companies. Though patient recruitment consumes 27 percent of the cost of development¹ -- that is US$5.9 billion annually around the world² -- only 1 in 20 recruited patients provides results that can be included in a regulatory dossier.³ The difficulty that most pharmaceutical companies face in recruiting and retaining patients is a major cause of clinical trial delays. In fact, over three-quarters of all clinical trials currently fail to meet their recruitment deadlines.⁴ Delays mean new drugs can't get to market, which can result in lost profits.

Improved patient recruitment presents one of the largest opportunities for pharmaceutical companies to eliminate delays in clinical trials, thereby making it possible to reduce time to market. Researchers at the IBM Institute for Business Value assessed current industry practices in patient recruitment. They focused on the most effective approaches to patient recruitment, the motivating factors for physician and patient participation and the capabilities required to successfully and efficiently complete a patient recruitment program.

Pharmaceutical companies need to increase the pool of available patients for clinical trials and, more importantly, retain them. At the same time, corporate processes must be aligned to enable companies to best access patients and prospective participants, as well as utilise them in subsequent trials. Finally, successful contenders in the pharmaceutical industry will be those who realign internal processes to gain speed by avoiding the "rework" that is typically a result of inadequate knowledge sharing within the company. The IBM assessment of the pharmaceutical market yielded the key challenges for pharmaceutical companies in their quest to optimise patient recruitment. The report offers ideas for how to meet these challenges:

• Improve the image of clinical trials
  
  
• Increase the pool of patients for clinical trials, and then retain them
  
  
• Improve access to the patient pool
  
  
• Align internal processes to increase the company's ability to utilise the patient pool in multiple clinical trials
  
  
• Use intellectual capital and data from previous trials to save time and gain competitive advantage
  

Time is money in the pharmaceutical industry. Delays in clinical trials keep pharmaceutical companies from their essential goal: being first to the marketplace with innovative new drugs. When patient recruitment is inefficient, valuable investment expense is wasted and precious time is lost -- as are potential profits and competitive edge.

To learn how your company can avoid trial delays and speed time to market, download the pdf at the top of this page.