After getting feedback from research sites over the years, it was clear that the biggest issue bogging down the site’s workflow was contacting patients that may not qualify for a trial only to find a few that do, explained Sam Haiden, executive director of strategic partnerships at StudyKIK.
To address this issue, the company yesterday released its Patient Messaging Application allowing research sites to securely communicate with patient referrals from their personal smartphone. Through the app, research sites can send and receive text messages throughout the StudyKIK portal.
That app was developed after research showed that 82% of patients enrolled in clinical trials prefer to communicate through text messaging, according to the company.
“What we’re really trying to do through this system is break up the pieces in order to improve that efficiency,” Haiden told us.
“For us, by breaking it up and taking a lot of that burden of essentially an administrator duty. By putting that on us and taking that burden off the sites and opening up transparency making sure the sites have that extra time to talk to the patient and build that trust so they’re not just chasing people down. By doing that we’ve seen a huge burst in efficiency.”
StudyKIK’s in-house department contacts patients to pre-screen before sending them to research sites. The patients are screened by the department the same way in which they would likely be screened by a clinical site coordinator.
Haiden explained, “So if a referral comes in the odds of them having time to either call that patient, follow up accordingly basically be on top of all these referrals is a pretty monumental ask. So for us, what we’re trying to do is make sure that we’re the ones who take the burden off that site.”
He further told us that interested patients receive three points of contact from StudyKIK, an automated text message, email, and then another message an hour after the first arrived. “Within basically 10 days, they will get 10 points of contact from StudyKIK,” Haiden said.
Through the in-house service, the company was able to get research sites to close enrollment early because StudyKIK was “able to get more people on the phone quicker, and get people to the research site faster.”
The company offers a portal in which sponsors, CROs, recruiters, and coordinators within a research site can track a patient’s progress through the recruitment process.
He further explained that StudyKIK links its system with all the different portal systems at research sites, and within study sponsors and CROs. Therefore any updates are visible through an analytical dashboard to manage all patient pre-screening.