Dr. Allen Lee is an Assistant Professor of Gastroenterology at the University of Michigan. His team studies functional bowel disorders and inflammatory bowel disease — conditions that are chronic and harder to recruit for than their prevalence might suggest. This is how they found a better way to reach participants.
The Research
Dr. Lee’s team is now running three active campaigns with OpenClinica Recruitment — a dietary intervention for Crohn’s symptoms, a pharmacologic agent study for Crohn’s disease, and an IBS campaign. But before any of that was possible, finding enough participants — and finding them efficiently — was the challenge that stood between the science and the results.
What Recruitment Looked Like Before
The standard approach in academic gastroenterology was as follows: review charts from the GI clinic to identify patients who might be eligible, then reach out by phone or email to see if they’re interested.
Recruitment failure is the leading cause of clinical trial delays and terminations, and for academic research teams relying on manual outreach, it’s a risk that’s difficult to see coming until it’s already a problem.
“You’re not necessarily targeting people who are interested and motivated — you’re just targeting people who could potentially fit your eligibility criteria,” Dr. Lee explained. “Whereas with advertising, you’ve already gotten past that hurdle. People are already showing that they’re motivated and interested.”
The spam filter problem made it worse, he explained. Even patients who might have been genuinely interested were increasingly unreachable. The volume of outreach required to generate a single interested participant had become unsustainable for a busy research team.
The Switch to Digital Advertising
Partnering with OpenClinica Recruitment reoriented the entire dynamic. Instead of starting with a list of clinic patients and working backward toward interest, the team now starts with people who have already demonstrated interest — by engaging with an ad, clicking through, and beginning a pre-screening process.
Dr. Lee’s approach has been deliberately broad: cast a wide net, let pre-screening surface the eligible participants, and adjust from there.
What Changed — In Numbers and in Time
The results speak for themselves:
1–2/month enrollment target — consistently met across all campaigns
3 campaigns now running, with a fourth submitted
0 ad iterations needed to achieve enrollment targets
But the number that matters most to Dr. Lee isn’t an enrollment figure. It’s time.
“It has 100% reduced the workload on my part just trying to find those participants. And the biggest thing is it frees me up to do other parts of research that I wasn’t able to do before.”
— Dr. Allen Lee
Customer support throughout the partnership has also been, in his words, “fantastic” — even if he hasn’t needed to lean on it heavily, because the strategy has worked without requiring much intervention.
Why It Works
The underlying reason the partnership has been effective is not complicated. Clinical trial recruitment often struggles — slowly, expensively, invisibly — when researchers spend the majority of their time finding people who might be eligible rather than working with people who want to participate. Digital advertising addresses that root cause directly.
“It just makes identifying motivated patients that much easier,” Dr. Lee said. “That has just been the biggest difference.”
He now has three campaigns running and a fourth submitted. The relationship is ongoing, and growing.
The Product in Use
OpenClinica Recruitment: Precision digital recruitment for clinical trials — including targeted multi-channel outreach, branded landing pages, smart eligibility pre-screening, and real-time funnel analytics. Designed for academic researchers, sponsors, and CROs who need predictable enrollment and IRB-compliant outreach across diverse populations.
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