E-recruitment of patients for clinical trials.

Patient recruitment has long been a critical bottleneck in the clinical trials process. Current methods of media-driven recruitment efforts often fail to identify adequate patient numbers in a timely manner and cannot scale to meet the growing needs of pharmaceutical companies. The internet, on the other hand, is providing the opportunity to enhance patient recruitment. E-recruiting is proving to be a useful tool in recruiting study participants. It leverages the power of the internet to enrol qualified candidates for clinical trials in a more timely and efficient manner than traditional advertising. E-recruitment is a mass communication medium through which its ability to narrowcast can identify highly defined patient populations. The screening technology made available by health technology companies is a much smarter way to find qualified patients for clinical trials. In the end, web-based recruiting will prove to be a more efficient and cost-effective means of obtaining clinical study participants than traditional advertising methods.