Recruitment, engagement, and retention continue to be among the greatest barriers to successful trial completion, with significant financial and ethical impacts.

As many of 86% of clinical trials do not reach recruitment targets within their specified time periods and 19% are closed or terminated early due to inability to accrue enough participants. Make sure your study doesn't end up in these statistics—schedule a consultation today to chat with us and learn more about how we can help!

Our participant recruitment experts provide tailored guidance to teams from a wide variety of therapeutic and non-therapeutic areas and for all types of study design. Utilizing extensive knowledge of research design, the practicalities of research implementation, behavioral economics, strategy adaptation, analysis of trends, mitigation of barriers, communication/design principles, and cohort characterization, we work with investigators and study staff to set up studies and trials for success.

In addition to over 25 years of combined experience, we provide cutting-edge resources to help researchers analyze protocols, accelerate start-up and manage participant recruitment and retention throughout the study lifecycle.

A few general resources are linked below, but be sure to visit our Recruitment Resource Center to access our custom catalog of recruitment templates, tools, resources, and advice!

Advice is always free! Request a consultation today to meet with our recruitment team. Need more support or want us to develop materials specific to your study and target population? We also offer Direct Support Services at an hourly recharge rate.

Recruitment Literature

• Engagement, Recruitment, and Retention LibGuide: a tool to improve accessibility to published literature about recruitment and retention of participants into research studies or clinical trials. It is designed to simplify the task of conducting a literature search about participant involvement, recruitment methodology, and lessons learned in completed research studies.
• Online Resource for Research in Clinical Trials (ORRCA): The ORRCA project aims to bring together published and ongoing work in the field of recruitment and retention research into a searchable database. Currently, ORRCA covers literature published up to the end of 2017.
• RIC Download: From the CTSA Recruitment Innovation Center. A summary of the latest recruitment news, literature, and events. View archive here and/or sign up to receive the newsletter twice a month.

Recruitment Planning

• Points to Consider: a nice overview from the National Institute of Mental Health on recruitment and retention considerations in planning a clinical study. Although this is from the NIMH, the points are relevant to any clinical study.
• UNC IRB SOP: recruitment and compensation guidelines found in section 2.4.12.