For most academic research teams, running a clinical study means working within five tools at once.
A recruitment platform to find participants. Email and phone to follow up with them. A spreadsheet to track who’s been contacted, who responded, and who went quiet three weeks ago. A separate system for consent. And an EDC — REDCap, or something similar — that has no idea any of the above happened.
Every handoff between those tools is a place where something can go wrong. A participant slips through. Data gets re-entered — or doesn’t. A coordinator spends forty minutes reconciling two spreadsheets that should have been the same spreadsheet.
Most teams have been doing this long enough that it feels normal.
The Problem Isn’t Your Team. It’s Your Workflow.
Clinical research coordinators are among the most capable, dedicated people in research. They’re also spending an enormous share of their time on work that technology should be doing for them.
The result is predictable: studies fall behind on enrollment because the workflow between recruitment and enrollment isn’t a system. It’s a coordinator doing their best with tools that weren’t built for what they’re being asked to do.
Recruitment is the number one reason studies fall behind. And running it across disconnected tools makes every part of the problem worse.
What Study Hub Is
Study Hub is a unified workflow platform that manages the entire participant journey — from the first recruitment contact through clinical data capture — across one connected system.
It’s built for academic research teams running investigator-initiated studies: the PI with three concurrent studies, the coordinator managing eighty participants across five different eligibility statuses, the site director who needs enrollment visibility without waiting for a spreadsheet someone else assembled.
Study Hub brings together four things that most teams are currently running separately:
Recruitment — targeted digital recruitment campaigns, study-specific screening forms, and real-time participant intake, built on OpenClinica Foundation. Qualified participants flow directly into engagement the moment they complete screening. No export. No handoff. No gap.
Engage & Enroll — two-way SMS, email, and phone outreach, all from the platform. Automated follow-up sequences triggered by participant status, time, or inactivity so no participant goes cold. Every message, call, and note lives in one participant record.
Consent & Enrollment — consent and enrollment happen in the same workflow as everything upstream, with no separate system to move a participant into. Status is tracked continuously, and communication stays consent-aware throughout. The moment someone is ready to enroll, they don’t have to wait on a coordinator to shift them into a different tool.
Capture Data — built on OpenClinica’s regulatory-compliant CDMS. This is not a lightweight tool layered on top of the workflow. It is the study system — structured data capture, full audit trails, and 21 CFR Part 11 compliance, with the participant record that started at recruitment flowing all the way through to data lock.
The participant you recruit is the same record you screen, engage, enroll, and capture data from. That continuity — one participant record, one continuous workflow — is what makes Study Hub different from adding another point tool to an already crowded stack.
What Changes When the Workflow Connects
The operational difference is specific and measurable.
Coordinators stop being the integration layer. Right now, the work of connecting recruitment to engagement to data capture falls to the people running the study. They do it through exports, copy-paste, manual logs, and institutional memory. Study Hub eliminates that unnecessary work.
Participants stop going cold. The most common place studies lose qualified participants is in the gap between interest and enrollment — the period when someone has raised their hand but nothing systematic is keeping them engaged. Automated follow-up sequences, triggered the moment a participant submits a form, close that gap without adding to the coordinator’s workload.
Data quality improves from the start. Every manual handoff between systems is an opportunity for an error: information entered twice, inconsistently, or not at all. When participant data flows through a single continuous record — from screening through data capture — those errors don’t happen, because the handoffs don’t exist.
Visibility becomes real. Most enrollment dashboards show whatever someone assembled last Friday. With Study Hub, enrollment status, participant interaction history, and data quality metrics reflect what’s happening today — because all of it is in one place.
Who Study Hub Is For
Study Hub is built specifically for academic and investigator-initiated research teams. It’s a platform designed from the start for the budget constraints, team sizes, compliance requirements, and workflow realities of investigator-initiated research.
If your team is:
- Running studies across REDCap, a recruitment vendor, email, and spreadsheets — and spending coordinator hours reconciling them
- Losing qualified participants between recruitment and enrollment because follow-up is inconsistent
- Unable to see real-time enrollment status without someone manually pulling numbers
- Re-entering the same participant information into multiple systems at every stage
Study Hub was built for you.
Getting Started
Study Hub is available now. Existing OpenClinica Recruitment and Foundation customers can contact their Customer Success Advisor directly to get started. New teams can learn more and request a walkthrough.
The walkthrough isn’t a deck or a demo video. It’s a live conversation about how your team runs recruitment and data capture today and exactly where the disconnects are costing you time, participants, and data quality.
We’d love to show you what Study Hub looks like in practice.
