The most common method adopted by sponsors and CROs to plan for patient recruitment is to use the research sites’ existing databases of patients. Sites will have suggested how many patients they think they can recruit and will then search through their patient records to cross check the detail against the Inclusion/Exclusion criteria for the trial.

This kind of chart review process is often laborious and time-consuming – in particular with increasingly-complex protocols being the norm for most trials, so it’s good to see various tools that have been developed in the last few years to help speed up this process. Though there will inevitably be some kind of data standardization processing necessary in order to use them successfully.

Some sites will prove most successful at sourcing trial participants – with a large number of sites providing just one or no patients at all.