Automated Recruitment Platforms (ARPs) offer primary care clinicians and allied health professionals’ opportunities for more time-efficient ways to engage with and recruit patients for clinical studies. Dr. Matt Wilson at uMed outlines the benefits of the technology and explains why the patient Electronic Health Record alone, although essential, is not a sufficient data set for successful clinical study recruitment in primary care.
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‘Finding the Right Patients for Primary Care Clinical Studies’
Automated Recruitment Platforms (ARPs) offer primary care clinicians and allied health professionals’ opportunities for more time-efficient ways to engage with and recruit patients for clinical studies. This is compared to traditional ‘manual’ methods such as phone and paper-based approaches. Dr. Matt Wilson, who founded clinical research platform uMed, outlines the benefits of the technology and explains why the patient Electronic Health Record (EHR) alone, although essential, is not a sufficient data set for successful clinical study recruitment in primary care. Automated patient recruitment can benefit healthcare providers and their patients by helping to recruit the right patients with targeted studies more promptly, at greater scale and with less impact on practice workload in a data-secure way.
What Automated Recruitment Platforms (ARPs) do
Automated Recruitment Platforms are a relatively new health technology solution which use smart phone, text/SMS, social media and other electronic communications to engage with a patient in a more individualised, data-secure way than traditional manual approaches when recruiting patients for clinical studies. They are able to shorten, safely, the time span needed for a clinical study and, with a patient’s consent, combine their EHR with other data sources such as the patient’s digital engagement with a health provider over time. This enables a health provider, for example a local community health centre, to match eligible patients to appropriate clinical studies, providing more accurate and richer data for the clinical study sponsor.
The challenges for patient recruitment in primary care
A major challenge for delivering research in primary care settings is the limited capacity for healthcare providers to support the extensive logistics needed for clinical studies. It requires time, knowledge of the research process, and often capital expenditure to set up the infrastructure to deliver research programmes. Secondary care health services, for example clinicians in hospital settings, often have more infrastructure, capacity and experience in undertaking clinical studies, including randomised controlled trials. In primary care, the time invested in a clinical study equates to precious time and budget expended away from clinical demands. Primary healthcare professionals, for example GPs in the UK, family physicians, practice nurses and allied health professionals, often find it difficult to accommodate this time, given their operational model and more urgent clinical responsibilities. The result is that opportunities for clinical research in primary care are lost as potential study sites decide against involvement. Even when a study is successfully launched in a primary care setting, there is a risk of studies not recruiting sufficient patients with the result that studies can be cancelled, delayed, only partially recruited for, or are terminated midway.
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