11 Apr Clinical Trial Patient Recruitment With Conversational Chatbots

How integrating chatbots to clinical trial patient recruitment strategies can optimize lead generation, decrease costs and shorten recruitment time

Clinical trials is a long and complex multistage process that can take years or even decades to complete before a new drug is approved to be sold to consumers on the market. One of the processes within a clinical trial, patient recruitment, can be greatly enhanced by the implementation of virtual assistant chatbots. The implementation of chatbots in patient recruitment strategies can decrease costs, optimize lead generation as well as shorten recruitment time.

One of the areas that conversational chatbots can help with patient recruitment is that they can decrease lead acquisition costs. Chatbots accomplish this by providing a fun interactive experience for the patient while collecting their information, which makes it more likely for an end user to continue with the process instead of abandoning the web form.

Advantages of implementing a conversational chatbot

• Chatbots can engage users in a conversational manner, which can decrease lead procurement cost by as much as 27% and have as much as 300% ROI on Facebook Ads.
• Chatbots assist employees by optimizing their productivity, which reduces costs and increases profitability.
• Virtual Assistant Chatbots are also less likely to make costly human errors while dealing with a high volume of inbound requests that could potentially result in lost leads.
• Chatbots are available 24/7 handling an infinite amount of chats instantly.
• Can help qualify leads before they reach clinical trial coordinators, resulting in higher quality lead captured and saving a coordinator valuable time.

Chatbots create a fun gamify experience for the end user, making them more likely to continue with the process and provide all the information over a long tedious static web form. More converted users from the chatbot mean higher conversion rate and lower lead acquisition cost.

Chatbots are expected to take up to $11 billion in total cost savings across all sectors by the end of 2023.

Omnichannel Conversational Chatbots

Using omnichannel chatbots in patient recruitment can help companies appeal more to millennials, who respond more positively to devices, voice interface, and messaging platforms and are usually on more than 1 major platform at once compared to baby boomers. Millennials prefer speed and instant response time offered by chatbots compared to the traditional more human-based recruitment method by Baby Boomers. By appealing to their target clientele, companies are more likely to obtain patients and have their client follow through with the sign-up process.

Advantages of an Omnichannel conversational chatbot

• Chatbots are omnichannel and can operate across multiple major platforms (FB, Slack, WordPress, etc) all at once.
• Can help in the optimization of the lead generation process
  Chatbots can capture all possible leads whether they are from mobile, desktop or tablet.
• Can be used to upsell users to multiple different clinical trials on major platforms, improving efficiency by giving users access to multiple opportunities through just one conversation with the chatbot.

Shortening recruitment time with Chatbots

Chatbots can potentially decrease recruitment time for clinical trials by decreasing the workload of coordinators as well as increasing response time.

The traditional method of patient recruitment is a lengthy process that requires a lot of involvement from the coordinators. Patients are recruited using an advertising campaign and their information is gathered using a web form and stored in a proprietary database. The clinical trial coordinator then has to contact each patient individually and qualify them over phone or email. This is an extremely drawn-out process and when the coordinator reaches out to the patients, many of them have already dropped out or completely forgot about the clinical trial they signed up for. Additionally, the quality of lead collected using web form is low quality as many people do not understand the complex requirements of the trial and signed up despite not being qualified.

Advantages of a chatbot to shorten recruitment time

Chatbots help bridge this gap by acting as the middleman between the coordinator and the patients.

• Chatbots can help coordinator pre-qualify leads by asking screening questions during the conversation to filter out non-qualified leads.
• Chatbots can provide instant responses to frequently asked questions, eliminating the phone calls and the back and forth by email.

In this digitally connected world, when a quick response time is paramount, companies who implement chatbots in clinical recruitment have an enormous advantage in converting warm leads into trial participants.

Conclusion

The integration of chatbots into the clinical trial patient recruitment strategy is undeniably a crucial step going forward for any company who operates in clinical trial recruitments.

The implementation of chatbots can decrease costs, optimize lead generation as well as shorten recruitment time and save time for the coordinator making it a win solution. Contact us today to implement a chatbot into your clinical trial strategy.