A sponsor representative, site representative, and an institutional review board (IRB) representative walk into a bar with a mission to solve patient recruitment challenges once and for all. Each of them orders a wildly different drink. Each of them spills most of their drink while scribbling obscure notes on bar napkins in huddled consultations with everyone but their original companions. Each leaves the bar declaring success with a plan they won’t discuss with anyone.
This didn’t actually happen, but the clinical trial community’s current approach to making patient recruitment more effective certainly feels just as fragmented and closeted as in the story.
However, expert speakers attending ACRP 2025 in New Orleans next April offer a path out of the recruitment murkiness and into the light in their session on “Best Advertising Practices and Partnerships for Patient Recruitment Success.” This diverse group will present perspectives from sponsors, contract research organizations (CROs), sites, and IRBs:
From the sponsor world will come Meghan Joseph, Site Engagement, Patient Recruitment & Retention, Moderna; from the site worlds will come Christine Senn, PhD, CCRC, CPI, FACRP, now Senior Vice President, Site-Sponsor Innovation, from Advarra, and Kayra Velez, Senior Marketing Specialist, Centricity Research; and from the IRB world will come Jason Rush, CIP, Senior Director, Regulatory, Advarra.
A curious and, in Senn’s opinion, under-discussed topic in patient recruitment is trial advertising. “Among other things,” Senn states, “so many sponsors are surprised to learn sites frequently actually receive unusable versions of ads.”
“The IRB sends the ads how they’re supposed to send them, with a time stamped approval and all of that, but sites can’t run a stamped version in the newspaper, and they can’t use a PDF ad on something like a digital billboard,” Senn continues. “Recognizing there is a disconnect between sponsors and sites in terms of receiving usable ads is a necessary first step to fixing a big problem.”
Another problem is that sponsor-created ads are sometimes not really made with the end-user in mind, according to Senn. “Our panel’s site marketing specialist will discuss how, for clinical trials, sponsor-created ads do not always follow advertising best practices nor health literacy principles. Presenters will also offer a reminder that the end-user for recruitment ads is the patient—and anyone creating the ad, whether it’s a sponsor or site, needs to understand that.”
Best Advertising Practices and Partnerships for Patient Recruitment Success
Join Christine, Kayra Velez, Jason Rush, and Meghan Joseph at ACRP 2025 [April 24-27; New Orleans, La.], where they will focus on how sites and sponsors/CROs can implement winning strategies in patient recruitment advertising that also meet IRB review expectations. View complete schedule.
Many site networks end up creating their own ads, she adds, either because they find the sponsor-provided ads unusable or objectionable in some way, or they prefer to go out of pocket themselves on patient recruitment. According to a recent study by the Society for Clinical Research Sites, 53% of sites choose to use their own money to fund recruitment. Unfortunately, very few sponsors and CROs have a process for approving such site-developed ads, so sites frequently wait months for sponsor approval (even when IRB approval only takes a week or two). Remembering her time leading a site network, Senn added, “I promise you I have been part of many clinical trials over the years where the trial closed to enrollment before our site-initiated ads made it through the CRO or sponsor process. We knew our communities, and that was always several months missed in possible additional enrollment.”
Finally, IRBs must apply 26-year-old guidelines to modern advertising practices like digital advertising , as the latest U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidance on such matters was published in 1998. “It’s hard sometimes to apply the guidance,” Senn says, “and that’s why you’ll end up getting a ‘no’ on an ad from one IRB and a ‘yes’ from another, or requests for changes to words like ‘compensation’ from one IRB but not another. Our panel’s IRB expert will share a call to action for IRBs to take an objective, non-defensive look at their policies and procedures and ask if their interpretations of the guidance are absolutely, positively correct. There is no such thing, of course, but it’s worthwhile to get as close as you can.”
Author: Gary Cramer
