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It's that time again... The Annual Meeting of the Drug Information Association is here! This year is the DIA's 50th anniversary, and to mark the occasion, the event's theme is "Celebrate the Past - Invent the Future." We anticipate numerous presentations and discussions about where the industry has come and where it's headed. We are delighted to bring a patient recruitment perspective to the conversation.

The 50^th Annual Meeting of the DIA is right around the corner! Today we're excited to kick off our promotion with a guest blog from our friend, Lani Hashimoto. Lani is an expert in global patient recruitment and retention with 19 years of clinical trial experience within global pharmaceuticals. In this post, Lani tells us about the Exhibit Hall Guide volunteer program she has coordinated at this year's Annual Meeting in an effort to facilitate networking opportunities between Patient Fellows and the pharmaceutical industry. So far, we've recruited two BBKers to volunteer and hope that you and your colleagues will participate, too!

Struggling musician? Tell me about it. I've been playing, or should I say, trying to play the guitar for a few years now. There are many different methodologies to playing a guitar, but at the end of the day, it's an instrument. And when I am not pretending to be Tom Petty on the weekends, I spend my days working in our technology department here at BBK Worldwide. The instrument I use on a daily basis is TrialCentralNet^TM (TCN^®), a metric-driven patient recruitment portal. So, where am I going with all this? Well, here is a quote from Johann Sebastian Bach that will set the tone for this blog post: "It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself."

On this day in 1747, James Lind, a Scottish physician, began what is now generally recognized as the first clinical trial. Among other things, his study of British sailors would provide evidence via a systematic experiment that scurvy could be treated by eating citrus fruits. While it had been generally recognized since antiquity in some parts of the world that citrus staved off this seaman's scourge, Lind's work contributed to creating a more systematic means of helping to ensure the health of the Royal Navy. In turn, one could argue Lind's experiment helped enable Britannia to rule the waves – and thereby European politics – for quite some time to come.

Reimbursing patients should be easy. Yet, often enough, it is one of the most challenging programs for sponsors to implement. When comparing reimbursement options, make sure your program isn't lacking these five essentials.

Pediatric studies are often difficult to enroll. And once the first-patient-in date has passed and the enrollment clock starts ticking, your difficult-to-enroll study can quickly become in peril of missing its planned last-patient-in date. BBK Worldwide has extensive experience bolstering enrollment efforts even after first-patient-in. Today, we're sharing a few pediatric case studies that achieved enrollment despite a slow start.
 

In this post, we are sharing a few of our favorite cards from the
BBK Worldwide Patient Recruitment Prep Deck. These exercises provide a wide range of engaging mind benders to help professionals involved in any aspect of the patient recruitment process. From protocol writing to consenting patients, these cards offer insight into the confluence of factors creating the unique challenges that face each individual protocol, as well as ideas for how to overcome them.

The cards showcased below highlight the five categories essential to clinical study enrollment: Redeployment, Implementation, Planning, Training and Support, and Infrastructure. Use these for investigators meetings, training your study team and site staff, and any time you are preparing for enrollment success!

Social media and other digital platforms have become a popular tactic for clinical trial patient recruitment. It's taken our industry some time to get on board, but Rome wasn't built in a day, and slow and steady can, in fact, win the race. We've written plenty of blogs about social media for patient-centric recruitment, so now, I'm going to throw you a curveball and talk about new platforms for site engagement. From enrollment tips to keep your site staff engaged, to helping your sites build an online presence, these digital communications tools can help! Here are three outlets you should consider for site engagement.

This blog contains an excerpt from Scrip Asia 100’s article, "Asian Patient Recruitment Comes of Age," which features Bonnie A. Brescia, founding principal, BBK Worldwide. Click here to download the full article.

This month, we've rounded up our most popular blogs, ranging from building and maintaining advocacy relationships to the correlation between advertising efforts and enrollment rates. Here are some of the latest ideas in patient recruitment happening at BBK Worldwide.