Patient satisfaction affects Veristat research outcomes, patient retention, and how fast a clinical trial design helps a drug company bring new drugs to the market. That begs the question; What’s the most effective approach to trial planning that takes patient satisfaction to the next level?
This article reveals four effective solutions that help increase patient satisfaction to overcome different hurdles. Some of these hurdles include declining patient retention and delays in completing the trial due to patient-related issues. Another hurdle worth considering during clinical trial planning is the bad patient experience during the study (patient dissatisfaction).
Let’s dive in.
Focus on both mental and physical health when recruiting
Clinical research teams often only consider the physical conditions when recruiting eligible participants. While these physical conditions are the core determiners of who’s qualified for the study, a patient’s mental issues significantly contribute to the participant’s burden of disease. Research shows that patients with mental health conditions incur 30% more costs than those without mental issues. The more the expense a patient incurs in a trial, the higher the chances of dropping out. According to a study, patients’ financial limitations are one of the biggest barriers to clinical trial participation. If you consider mental health when recruiting, you only enroll patients who won’t incur extra costs because of mental issues. Alternatively, understanding a patient’s mental health during the recruitment ensures you manage the patient’s current condition before it becomes a health concern, which could cause dropout during the trial.
Use complete data sets
It’s common for trial participants to receive care from multiple healthcare providers outside and inside the hospital or clinical trial site. This makes it difficult for healthcare systems to unify and aggregate all patient data from multiple sources. Fragmented and incomplete data leads to decisions that aren’t based on the complete picture of a participant’s health. Clinical trial leaders must have easy access to integrated data sets to make fully informed decisions. As such, having reliable technology can organize clinical data from multiple sources for a highly accurate patient grouping.
Leverage customizable and transparent technology
Patient health strategies heavily rely on accurate technology to stratify participant groups. Clinical trial leaders want to understand the inputs underlying a given algorithm to trust the patient cohorts it creates. If the technology isn’t transparent, it may cause a lack of faith in its output. Therefore, using a technology that is validated, transparent, and flexible is key. This ensures clinical trial leaders can clearly understand the available clinical trial data and adjust it accordingly.
Measure return on investment
Knowing the return on investment (ROI) is crucial in clinical trials. ROI is required to understand what’s working and what’s not in the trial. This ensures you make data-driven decisions when scaling adoption in your clinical trial. Measuring the ROI of clinical trial initiatives can be difficult, but you can use several approaches.
You can simultaneously measure results for the study group and control cohort to calculate ROI in real-time. You can also leverage proven ROI frameworks that have worked for other studies in your clinical trial.
