How much empathy and compassion are in your clinical trial recruitment process?

When a patient or a caregiver is conducting research about their condition, the most obvious starting point (beyond their own doctor) is the Web.

After bouncing around the usual sites - WebMD, Mayo, Wikipedia, etc. - the patient might eventually end up at ClinicalTrials.gov.

Now take one look at that site. Cold, dry... government site.

If they're lucky, there just might be a link to a website for the trial they'd considering enrolling in. But in most cases, the site has been thrown together in a few weeks and does little to engage and empathize with the patient.

We see it all the time. As a company is approaching the time to recruit participants, suddenly their 10 years of effort and $700 million to $1 billion in funding culminates in a weak, hasty effort to enroll patients.

Think of the drastically different results if you took the time to define your patient personas, map out their various journeys, establish an online community for them to hear from other patients, share the details of their own journey - and find content that immerses them in an empathetic experience that practically ensures that they will sign up for your trial.