Wake Forest and Duke CTSAs collaborate on national clinical trial participant perception study
Pioneering initiative will collect and share nationally data on clinical trial participants' perceptions throughout the United States.
Wake Forest CTSI's Dr. Joseph Andrews says efforts are underway to improve clinical trials nationally through Empowering the Participant Voice, a $2.7M study funded by the CTSA Collaborative Innovation Award. WFSM joins fellow CTSAs Vanderbilt University, Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, University of Rochester, and leading institution, Rockefeller University. The goal is to develop, implement, and nationally deploy a validated instrument called the Research Participant Perception Survey (RPPS) and a system of collaborative analytics dashboards collecting RPPS feedback.
Participants are an essential component of clinical trials—clinical trials don’t exist without them. Yet recruitment remains a challenge, and the data shows an alarming pattern: approximately 86 percent of clinical trials fail to meet their recruitment goals with average trial dropout rates rising to 19.1 percent in 2019. These data show a problem, but they also show clear feedback that participants aren’t satisfied with the clinical trial experience.
What more could we learn if participants’ perspectives were collected proactively? As Dr. Andrews shares, "We want to better understand how we can improve the participant experience so that people are less reluctant to join clinical trials, and we're more likely to retain people who do join, rather than dropping out because of something that was preventable?"