Respiratory Patient Recruitment

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Whether the condition is asthma, COPD, chronic cough or sleep apnea, respiratory patients have unique recruitment challenges. Finding, engaging and recruiting these high-risk patient populations, especially those at risk for COVID-19 complications, takes a precise mix of expertise, specialists and infrastructure.

Why AES for respiratory clinical trials?

The details make the difference for a patient population that may be particularly burdened by the demands of clinical trials. For example, our ability to find patients near, but unknown to, research sites eases travel burdens. Virtual first office visits, virtual pre-screening and telehealth helps patients and their caregivers overcome transport issues. Our on-site investigators bring experience conducting research in respiratory diseases and understand the patient journey, creating a superior patient experience. And having AES sites situated in the community—not at hospitals—brings more comfort and accessibility to patients potentially at risk for COVID-19 complications.

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Featured Respiratory Indications

Asthma clinical trials

When we employ our solutions for asthma studies, we also bring to bear our resources, experience and expertise developed specifically for all asthma-related indications.

We’ve randomized over 2,200 patients in more than 50 studies around the world.

This experience doesn’t just give us unmatched expertise – it gives us the data we need to create recruitment plans that will generate results for your study, along with the confidence to back up our results with performance-based pricing. These data also give us the insights to identify more accurately the patients most likely to enroll in your study, including those outside of small, depleted databases of confirmed asthma patients at specialist sites.

Our proprietary database includes millions of trial-ready patients with asthma, including patients with mild or severe disease as well as pediatric patients. We know who these patients are, where to find them, their preferences and how to provide them with a superior clinical trial experience.

In addition, we bring to asthma trials our respiratory team’s vast clinical trial experience, a mature network of pulmonologists who provide patient referrals and serve as investigators or consultants when needed, and a pre-screening platform capable of delivering the scale needed to find qualified patients that meet the increasingly narrow inclusion/exclusion criteria often characteristic of asthma trials.

Chronic cough

Although chronic cough is common, the condition is often unreported or undiagnosed. Finding qualified patients who meet the highly specific inclusion/exclusion criteria characteristic of these studies can be a significant challenge.

We combine insights from our past experience enrolling chronic cough studies with proprietary research to help shed light on the attributes and behaviors highly predictive of a randomized patient. From there, we develop study-specific strategies and tactics combined with local recruiting efforts tailored to how patients prefer to engage. For this indication, we’ve found that social media (e.g., online health networks), direct mail, print, e-mail and mining of the existing AES database (detailed records on 420,000 pre-screened chronic cough trial candidates) have proven to be effective tactics.

Finally, we use a centralized online and telephone evaluation system to pre-screen patients and confirm respondent eligibility. Our method differentiates between unexplained and refractory chronic cough, and we can refer qualified patients to research sites, shortening timeframe and typically exceeding enrollment targets.

Screening across multiple respiratory indications at a portfolio level

COPD studies, similar to asthma and chronic cough studies, often require a very specific cohort of patients.

One of our innovations in recruiting these patient populations is to screen across multiple indications at a portfolio level to realize new efficiencies and subsequent cost reduction. Throughout the patient pre-screening process, innovative algorithms filter the patient data into the clinical trial with the best fit. Our virtual pre-screening process is also able to establish background therapy and exacerbation history to potentially match patients with study eligibility criteria.

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Portfolio approach efficiencies:

Lower attrition rate

Fewer patient referrals and screenings needed to achieve required randomizations

Certainty

More predictable site selection, site startup, enrollment rates and study conduct–all without sacrificing quality–lead to cost and timeline control and efficiencies