I am Dr. Jeff Kingsley and this is another edition of Riding in Cars With Researchers! Today we are going to interview Felicia Irvin, who is Director of Sales and Marketing for IACT Health, a multi-specialty research site. She has about a decade of experience in finding patients for research trials. So, how do you find appropriate patients for research trials so you are not wasting the patients time, your own time, and accelerating research? Let’s start with talking about traditional methods - what traditionally do sites do to find patients for research trials? Traditional marketing methods use traditional media which you are probably already familiar with like newspaper, radio, and tv. You are not really targeting a specific market with those types of media. Most of your traditional media venues will have data on their audience, but it’s a much wider catchment area. While this is the traditional way, it’s not the way we use as much as some of the other ways I will talk about today. Why? Why don’t we use traditional methods? Mostly because you don’t have as much customized marketing. By using different types of marketing such as social media, where you can create a marketing campaign which will focus directly on the type of person that might fit a specific research trial. With social media like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn a person puts in a lot of user information and these platforms know where you live, what your likes are, and what information you are searching for in your browser history. It’s a way to reach more patients and, if nothing else, better education for patients. So teach me something else - what is another way you find patients? Another cool way of targeting or marketing is geofencing. All the technology we have with satellites and everyone carrying a cell phone, there are certain data that can be captured about what areas you travel in. So you might have an ad pop up on a website that talks about COPD around a pulmonary practice. You know those patients are going to be there and a lot of marketers are going to use it to say maybe we are going to put an ad about children’s classes around a children’s gym where parents are around the gym and search the internet and they are going to see that ad. That’s a basic way of how geofencing works. Okay, so what else? Some non-media types of ways we find patients, the biggest is patient databases. We work with a lot of physicians and every physician has an EMR, or a database where they track patient’s medical records and information. We are able to go in and help that physician figure out what patients will be be suited for the clinical research trial. So what else do you have up your sleeve? There are a few other things that we can do. Physicians themselves can refer at any time and that’s a pretty accurate way. A couple of other ways that we’ve found helpful for studies that can be pretty tricky when it’s based on a lab result or a medication a patient has to be on, we’ve had great help through the different labs that are associated with our clinical sites, looking at the pharmacy records that are associated with the site to see if this patient is on this medicine, this trial, for example, may pay for this medicine. Instead of the patient having to pay for it, we can put them in a clinical trial and get that medication paid for. Any last bit of advice? My advice would be to be a Medical Hero! Our biggest challenge in clinical research is finding patients to participate, so help us, be a participant, and be a Medical Hero. So revolutionizing research. We’ve talked about how slow it is, how enrollment times go over, so look at this armamentarium. Use all these different methods to find patients for your trials. Great advice! Thank you very much for riding along.