CenterWatch State of the Clinical Trials Industry Introduction
Patient recruitment continues to be among the foremost challenges to investigative sites. According to a CenterWatch 2007 survey, 70 percent of investigative sites surveyed cited delays in patient enrollment to be one month or longer in duration. Study delays are costly to pharmaceutical companies especially as the demand for new drugs increases. Finding and recruiting qualified patients into trials is a growing concern within the industry. Compounding this situation are the demanding protocols that make it more difficult to find and enroll eligible subjects. Further compounding this situation is the complex patient enrollment process that requires longer and more complicated consent documents. In this special report, CenterWatch examines patients’ clinical trial participation experiences as well as physicians’ perspectives on referring patients into trials.