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Adding sites is the fastest lever when enrollment stalls. Here is why it fails, and what to run first. When enrollment falls behind, expanding the network of clinical research sites is the lever sponsors can pull fastest. Site counts are visible, contractable, and reportable to leadership. The reflex makes sense. The real question is whether the market holds enough patients who can qualify, and m…

Patients clear your eligibility criteria, ask to be contacted, then vanish before they enroll. So why does a trial full of willing patients still miss its enrollment number? The answer sits in the steps between qualifying and enrolling, and those steps decide the number your forecast actually hits.

Finding the right patients for your clinical trial can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. When enrollment stalls, timelines slip, and costs add up quickly. Patient recruitment services have become essential for pharmaceutical sponsors looking to connect with eligible participants faster and more efficiently.

Recruitment plans start with a headcount: this many patients with the condition, in these regions, so the trial is feasible. The math looks sound. The patients are real. Then enrollment stalls, and the assumption underneath the plan goes unquestioned: that a patient who exists is a patient the trial can reach. Those are two different things. And the gap between them is where feasible-on-paper stu…

Enrollment is behind, so the plan is to add clinical research sites. It feels like progress. It looks like a fix. It’s also the most expensive way to stay exactly where you are. Adding sites is a rational instinct. When the timeline slips and the board wants a number, expanding the network is the fastest lever available. But the instinct rests on an assumption: more sites means more patients, fas…

You selected your sites carefully. Six months in, enrollment is behind. The instinct: find better sites, bring more online. But site selection wasn’t the constraint. Narrow eligibility criteria were eliminating patients before a site could enroll them. In a Parkinson's Market Feasibility Test (a patient survey run before a single site opens) only 4% of 214 respondents qualified despite strong awa…

Market Feasibility helps test patient reach, understanding, and qualification signals earlier. Your patients don’t see a protocol. They see a headline, an image, a landing page, a screener question, a call, and a decision: Is this worth my time? That first interaction shapes what they understand before a site ever speaks with them. It tells them whether the study feels relevant, credible, and cle…

Clinical trials are moving toward faster data, faster signals, and faster decisions. The FDA recently announced real-time clinical trial proof-of-concepts and a proposed pilot program designed to help trial endpoints and data signals move to the agency in real time. The agency also opened a Request for Information, with comments due by May 29, 2026. That’s a major shift for clinical development. …

Are you still recruiting for “hypertension”… or for the full cardiometabolic reality your protocol actually requires? Hypertension used to be treated (and recruited) as a single-variable disease: elevated blood pressure. That model no longer reflects clinical reality. Today’s hypertension patient is increasingly part of a broader cardiometabolic profile: obesity, insulin resistance, type 2 diabet…

Clinical trial referrals don’t usually fail because patients aren’t interested. They fail because too many patients are pushed downstream before they’re truly qualified, informed, and ready for the next step. That creates a familiar pattern across studies: high referral volume, low referral quality, overloaded site teams, delayed enrollment, and preventable screening waste that gets blamed on rec…

Obesity remains one of the most commercially important areas in clinical development, but it is also one of the easiest places to misread recruitment performance. Strong demand can make enrollment look easier than it really is. In practice, the challenge is not simply generating interest. It is identifying the right patients early, educating them clearly, and moving them forward without adding av…

Smarter Matching, Faster Access: How AI Is Changing Clinical Trial Recruitment Finding the right clinical trial has long been a frustrating and time-consuming process for patients. Many spend hours searching through listings, trying to interpret complex eligibility criteria, only to discover they don’t qualify or never hear back. That experience is starting to change. AI in clinical trial recruit…

AI in Patient Recruitment: Signal, Limits, and the Operating Reality AI is already influencing patient recruitment. The real question is whether recruitment leaders are governing it or letting it run unchecked. In our latest whitepaper, AI in Patient Recruitment: Signal, Limits, and the Operating Reality, we move beyond hype and outline a practical operating model for sponsors, CROs, and research…

An overview of key hemophilia facts The rare, inherited blood disorder hemophilia is estimated to impact approximately 20,000 individuals in the United States, and over 400,000 worldwide. Currently, there is no cure for hemophilia — but through ongoing research, medical experts are continually learning more about the disease. Though there is still a lot of information to discover regarding hemoph…

Clinical trial participants help move research forward while gaining access to the latest potential treatments. Liver disease, also known as hepatic disease, is a broad term that includes hepatitis, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), fatty liver disease, and cirrhosis. Liver disease often develops undetected over years, without obvious symptoms. According to the American Liver Foundation, liver…

Topics: For Sponsors During the COVID-19 pandemic, many clinical trials adapted by adding virtual elements to their traditional trial approaches. While many could not go fully virtual due to the need to collect samples at specific milestones and check on patients in person, folding in technology kept patients safer and reduced the burden to participation. In many cases, it allowed research to sta…

What to know about colon cancer stages Despite the fact that colorectal cancer cases have been declining in the United States since the mid-1980s, it is still the third most common cancer diagnosed each year excluding skin cancer. Often shortened to colon cancer, colorectal cancer occurs when cells in the colon and/or the rectum begin to grow uncontrollably and eventually spread to other parts of…

Clinical trial participants help move research forward while gaining access to the latest potential treatments. Obesity is defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more, and according to the CDC, about 35% of American adults and 17% of American children and teenagers fall into this category. People who are obese are at higher risk of health problems such as type 2 diabetes, heart diseas…

Does Emotion-Based Marketing Work for Clinical Trial Patient Recruitment? Patients are more likely to take action for their health after seeing ads that trigger fear and hope, according to new research in the 2018 Wunderman Health Inertia Study. While healthcare marketers typically jump at the chance to test out new research findings with their own audience, those who communicate clinical trial o…

How to achieve patient centricity in clinical trial listings Facilitating medical research relies on patient participation, yet research protocols often overlook the patient perspective. Improving patient centricity in clinical trials demands prioritizing the patient experience. To better understand what patients want and need at the beginning of their clinical trial journey, Antidote conducted a…