ACT: You hosted a session on how to “Unlock the Power of the Patient for Better Patient Recruitment Outcomes.” What was the premise of the presentation?
Pellegrino: It was talking about a company, AutoCruitment, which focuses on bringing patient recruitment solutions. There’s really two primary points I was trying to make in that. One is that to really substantially change the way that clinical trials are enrolled, and to increase the patient number of people that get access to trials, you really have to develop solutions that focus on a very large part of the population that doesn’t get the opportunity to participate in trials when you’re working through sites alone. We find that only 10% of the patients that are eligible for trials actually get the opportunity to participate in one with the relationships they have with sites. Our recruitment focuses on that other 90% in developing strategies to access that population. That was the first primary point, but the second point is that you have to have in place the right services to qualify those patients to help support the sites and the patients to make sure that they are translating into randomized patients. We talked a lot about the services and the ways that we accomplish that.
ACT: In your experience, what are the most common patient recruitment challenges that you’ve encountered?
Pellegrino: Access to patients is absolutely one of them, but even when you get access to those patients, qualifying them is really, really critical, because the protocols usually have very narrow inclusion/exclusion criteria. A lot of times that inclusion/exclusion criteria can’t be validated unless you have a relationship with that patient or have access to their medical history, so depending on the requirements and the complexity of the protocol, sometimes it can be difficult to find patients that are qualified and appropriate for the clinical trial. That’s one of the challenges. The other challenge is that you do rely on the clinical trial sites to make a recruitment campaign successful and clinical trial sites are working on a lot of trials right now, and sometimes they’re understaffed and they don’t have all the resources they need, so you need to be able to have support for those sites to be able to work with the additional patients so that they can capture more patients in their practice, see those patients, and then put them into trials.
ACT: Could you describe what EMR Capture & Intelligence technology is exactly, and how it can help identify and qualify patients?
Pellegrino: Yes, that was EMR Capture & Intelligence, and that’s one of the services that we have to help better qualify patients for complex protocols. Patient recruitment companies a lot of the time rely on self-reported data from patients in order to see if they’re eligible to refer them to trial sites, so we’re not relying purely on self-reported data. We have a new service, EMR Capture & Intelligence, which allows us to get the consent from the patients directly to review their medical records. It’s all automated in our technology, where we can collect their medical records very easily for them, and then we have AI-powered technology that reviews those records and organizes that data and assesses it to see if they’re eligible for the protocols. We find that is really effective in some of those harder conditions and more complex protocols to be able to find some of those harder to find patients.
ACT: What other sessions or topics at DPharm have piqued your interest?
Pellegrino: I would say an area that’s always top of mind and top of interest for me is different strategies to be able to access patients, as I shared. We find that to be really effective in driving higher enrollment rates, you have to be able to reach that 90% of the population, so I find I’m really pleased to see so many companies that are working in this space now looking for creative solutions and ways to find patients, and that’s always an area of great interest to me and AutoCruitment.