Many clinical trials today treat patient burden with kid gloves—offering comforts and courtesies to soften the blow of a fundamentally flawed process. But what if we stopped trying to soften the blow and instead focused on removing the barrier entirely?
This is the critical difference between accommodation and re-engineering.
Accommodation (The “Kid Gloves” Approach): This is about making an inconvenient or burdensome task more pleasant. For example, offering a pre-paid taxi for a 3-hour round trip to a clinic for a 15-minute procedure. It’s a well-intentioned gesture, but it doesn’t give the patient back the half-day of work they lost. This is “friendliness.”
Re-engineering (The “Core Change” Approach): This is about fundamentally redesigning the process to eliminate the inconvenient task altogether. In the same scenario, it would mean leveraging technology to conduct that 15-minute procedure with a home health nurse or via a telehealth visit. This gives the patient their time back. This is true “patient-centricity.”
This distinction is not just semantic; it’s the difference between a trial that struggles and one that succeeds. The “Kid Gloves” approach does little to affect the core metrics that lead to the $8 million-a-day cost of delays. “Core Change,” however, directly impacts the bottom line by:
- Preventing costly protocol amendments (which can cost over $500,000 in Phase 3).
- Slashing recruitment timelines (by up to 43% or more).
- Reducing the average 30% patient dropout rate, which is driven by burden.
The first step in re-engineering is to challenge our assumptions and understand what matters most to patients. We’re currently asking our network of industry leaders this very question.
Click here to cast your vote in our LinkedIn poll and see what your peers think is the most impactful change.
It’s time to look at our own standard operating procedures and ask a tough question: Are they designed for the convenience of the site, or the reality of the patient’s life? Dive deeper in our white paper “The Patient Centricity Imperative”
