A recap of our March 11 webinar with OpenClinica CEO David Kay
Clinical trial patient recruitment fails more often than it should—and the cause usually isn’t a shortage of eligible participants. It’s the operational chaos that happens once they express interest.
On March 11, OpenClinica CEO David Kay hosted a session walking through why enrollment falls behind and what actually changes when recruitment is treated as clinical infrastructure rather than a marketing activity. Here’s a summary of what he covered.
The Problem Isn’t Finding Participants—It’s Managing Them
Participants come from everywhere: registries, health system referrals, digital campaigns, flyers, community events, publications, and advocacy groups. Every source is legitimate. Every source also creates its own intake path—and someone on your team is manually managing all of them.
85% of clinical trials fail to meet their enrollment targets—not because participants don’t exist, but because teams struggle to manage them effectively once they show up. When leads arrive, they get funneled into tools that were never built for recruitment: REDCap forms used as intake systems, shared email inboxes, office phones passed between coordinators, manual call logs in spreadsheets.
The result: coordinators spend roughly 40% of their time on administrative work that could be automated—manual data entry, tracking signatures, phone tag—instead of supporting participants and managing study operations.
Where Enrollment Loss Actually Happens
Most enrollment loss happens before screening even begins. The failure points are workflow failures, not awareness failures:
- Delayed first contact after someone expresses interest
- Missed follow-ups because there’s no system to track them
- No visibility into where a participant is in the funnel
- Duplicate or lost records across disconnected tools
The gap between when someone fills out a form and when they hear back is where participants disappear. 80% of trials face delays due to enrollment challenges. 90% take twice as long as planned to meet their goals.
This is a workflow problem.
Recruitment Hasn’t Received the Same Treatment as Data Capture
EDC has been modernized over the past two decades. It’s structured, validated, and auditable. Recruitment, by contrast, is still largely improvised, manual, and fragmented.
And once a participant qualifies? Their data has to be manually re-entered into EDC. Screening history is disconnected from the study record. There’s no continuity from recruitment through study conduct—and real risk of transcription errors and delays.
You start the trial by recreating the participant you already found.
What Changes When Recruitment Is Integrated
When recruitment and study conduct operate from the same system, a few things change fundamentally.
Targeting becomes protocol-driven, not generic. Instead of broad campaigns hoping the right people see them, inclusion/exclusion criteria inform who gets reached—across social media, search, and community networks.
Pre-screening happens before coordinator contact. Digital eligibility surveys filter non-qualifiers before anyone picks up the phone. Identity verification catches duplicates and fraud before enrollment. Participants move through a branded, HIPAA-compliant experience from their first touchpoint.
Lead management moves out of spreadsheets. Every lead visible in one place. Eligibility status clear at a glance. Outreach managed without shared inboxes or shared phones. Status tracked through the funnel in a system that was actually built for it.
Qualified participants flow directly into EDC—no re-entry required. Once eligibility is confirmed, participants sync into OpenClinica EDC automatically. Relevant prescreen data transfers with them. Study conduct begins immediately.
See how OpenClinica Recruit works →
Recruitment as Clinical Infrastructure
The framing David kept returning to: recruitment isn’t a marketing exercise bolted onto research. When it’s integrated with study operations, it becomes part of the clinical trial infrastructure itself.
That means recruitment data flows into study operations. Coordinators work in one system. Forecasting is based on actual funnel data. And when something isn’t working, you find out in week three—not month six.
Read case studies from teams who’ve made the switch →
Watch the full recording to see David’s complete breakdown, including the Q&A.
Curious what integrated recruitment would look like for your next study? Try our ROI Calculator or get in touch.
