Explore how AutoCruitment's technology-driven approach is transforming clinical trial recruitment, reducing enrollment timelines by 9 months while achieving a 97% increase in patient randomizations. Learn how their digital patient engagement strategy operates across 37 countries, addressing one of healthcare's most persistent challenges.
Key Takeaways:
Jill Pellegrino, CEO, AutoCruitment
Megan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACT Live
Welcome 0:01 Welcome to Digital Health talks. Each week we meet with healthcare leaders making an immeasurable difference in equity, access and quality. Hear about what tech is worth investing in and what isn't. As we focus on the innovations that deliver. Join Megan Antonelli, Janae sharp and Shahid Shah for a weekly no BS, deep dive on what's really making an impact in healthcare.
Megan Antonelli 0:29 Hi everyone. Welcome to Digital Health talks. This is Megan Antonelli, CEO of health impact, live and today we are diving into clinical trial innovation with auto recruitment. Jill Pellegrino, auto recruitment is a company revolutionizing patient recruitment through AI and digital engagement. Their platform has cut enrollment timelines by nine months, while achieving 97% increase in patient randomizations across 37 countries. Join us as we explore how technology is solving one of Healthcare's most persistent challenges, connecting the right patients with life changing clinical trials. Hi Jill, thanks for being here today. Hi
Jill Pellegrino 1:06 Megan, thank you for having me. You know, I worked in,
Megan Antonelli 1:09 you know, clinical trials. We used to do an event in that space a long time ago, and patient recruitment was always, you know, really the biggest, the biggest challenge. And you would think people want to be, you know, involved in these clinical trials and cutting edge research, but it is. It is a tough and expensive part of the clinical trial research process for pharmaceutical companies and and the hospitals that that support them. Tell me a little bit about your background and how you got involved with auto recruitment. Sure,
Jill Pellegrino 1:40 yeah, and you're absolutely right, that patient recruitment part clinical trials is a really important one, and it's often one of the ones that has the most challenges. And I've been in this space for 18 years now, and spent most of my career at trying to solve the patient recruitment challenge in this in this issue. And so I started at a company called a curion that was focused on patient recruitment, and that organization was later bought by PPD, which is a CRO and they started acquiring different site networks and formed accelerated enrollment solutions. So I was part of that organization for 14 years and sat in various leadership positions in accelerated enrollment solutions. So that, you know, I got a really good understanding of the patient recruitment industry and what the needs are, as well as the site business, because the accelerated enrollment solutions at 160 global sites across the world. So I left there in 2021 and went to CVS Health. Was there for about three years, CVS Health was entering into clinical trials and was looking for some leaders who had experience in that space. So I was working there with their various businesses to develop solutions for pharma, utilizing their data. So I worked in patient recruitment and real world evidence while I was there, and then, most recently, I joined auto recruitment. I've been here for a year now as the CEO, it's our recruitment is a founder run business or LED business, been around for about 10 years, and I was really excited to be able to join this organization and lead it through its next chapter. You know, having been in this space for so long, and having worked on patient recruitment, I was really excited to see an organization that has really driven meaningful results in this space. Across that 10 years, we've worked in 120 different conditions across 700 studies, and we've randomized over 13,000 people into clinical trials. Oh,
Megan Antonelli 3:41 wow. Yeah, that's, you know, it is. It's such an amazing area and that that's great. Tell me a little bit about kind of the what is the technology platform? What makes auto recruitment, you know, different from from some of the other solutions out there? Sure.
Jill Pellegrino 3:57 So at our recruitment, we're really, really focused on going direct to patient. You know, we find that one of the reasons why there's continues to be challenges in clinical trial enrollment is because the industry in general relies heavily on clinical trial sites to be able to find the patients, but at the end of the day, very limited number of fish and physicians actually participate in research. So the the number of patients that ever get the opportunity to participate in a trial or even hear about a trial is very low. Only about 10% ever hear about clinical trials as an option to participate. So at autocarrier, we focus on that other 90% in developing strategies to reach that population, make them aware of clinical trials and then help facilitate the handover the process so that they get the opportunity to participate. So we have a technology platform that allows us to so. Start with digital advertising to be able to reach that population. So we're able to reach a large audience of participants and make them aware of the opportunities that could be available to them. And then our technology platform tracks those patients and helps facilitate them through the process. There's multiple steps that happen, from the time that they first respond to an ad to the time that they actually make it into the trial. And auto recruitment is focused on that end to end process to make sure that we're finding the right patients that are both interested and motivated but are also highly qualified for each clinical trial.
Megan Antonelli 5:35 Oh, wow. What I mean when it comes to that, that challenge in terms of only a certain amount of physicians participating in clinical trials. Why is that? I mean, is it just the academic research centers and the docs that there? Or is it broader than that, you know, is that? Is that something that can be solved for or is it just sort of the nature of, yeah, and
Jill Pellegrino 6:00 it's, I guess, two fold. One is the barrier of entry to for physicians to enter into trials is is pretty high. There's a lot of organizations that that try to assist with that, that make it easier for research naive physicians to participate. But the other, the other reason, is that when sponsors are running trials, and they're designing the protocol. They're looking for physicians that are very experienced and have the expertise and the knowledge. So a lot of times, they often go to the same positions over and over again. So I you know, from my perspective, it's just not practical, practical to really solve this problem holistically through the physicians. And a lot of the areas that audit recruitment is working in are conditions where patients are more and more looking for their own solutions and are online and they're researching the conditions. So even if they are working with a physician or have a relationship with a healthcare institution that does do research a lot, sometimes it's easier for them to find out about it on their own. So I think to really attack the problem is you can absolutely try to get more physicians interested, and that's needed, but to really, really drive meaningful results, you go direct to the patient who you know is the most you know, motivated participant to really try to find different options for their healthcare, right?
Megan Antonelli 7:28 Well, and that, I mean in terms of that digital advertising, which, of course, has, you know, evolved so much over the years, in terms of pharma ability to kind of communicate, create communities with patients, all of that. Tell me a little bit about, you know, how auto equipments approach to that space, you know, is evolving, has changed and is working in terms of matching quality patients to the tribe. Yeah, and
Jill Pellegrino 7:53 I agree that there's been a lot of movement in that with pharma using digital advertising to reach patients, which is really encouraging to see. You know, I would say over the last couple of years, it's become a lot more common for sponsors to proactively plan to have a digital advertising campaign included in their in their studies. So I think that's good. It's definitely more accepted now, and I think people are recognizing that it's a necessity. What we found at audit recruitment, though, is it does, it does take a lot of experience and expertise to really maximize the ROI that you're getting when you're placing these ads. It's unfortunately, not as simple as just developing an ad and placing it on Facebook. It's a highly competitive space, and we find that with our extensive experience across so many studies and tracking all of those data metrics across all of those different campaigns, that we're really able to lean on that to be able to inform what is the most effective strategy to reach patients digitally. And we find that you really have to be working across multiple channels. You can't just be working on one platform. You have to be engaging and reaching out to patients in multiple ways, online. And you also have to really have the flexibility to do a lot of tests and learn around the messages you know, both the messages that you're using, but also what they look like, what the pictures, what the visuals are. And that's an area that we're constantly iterating and learning and and trying to optimize how we're reaching patients. Yeah,
Megan Antonelli 9:28 we used to have a thing where we would say, you know, the commonly, everyone says that fish, where the fish are, you know, go where the patients are, you know. And, and, you know, give them that. Where are you finding that they are now more, you know? And I used to work at WebMD, so it was like, you know, they would come there for healthcare. Now, there's so many places for them to go for healthcare information online, you know, what are some of the channels that are best for this? Yeah,
Jill Pellegrino 9:56 well, social media is as absolutely still a. Primary channel that we rely on, and I think a lot of organizations rely on, but we also work with a lot of partners that do similar thing, like publisher so like web N D, like, they may not be just on web N D and like known health care websites, but they're absolutely out there on websites with different like healthcare blogs or any type of healthcare information. So there's ways that you can work with those organizations to be able to place ads there, so that if they're doing a research article on like migraines, then you can put in, you know, migraine ads there,
Megan Antonelli 10:38 right? And then, in terms of, you know, obviously we've talked a lot about the use and the application of AI and kind of the getting to know patients, but also, I imagine generative AI and the ability to have chat bots to screen and things like that. Are those things that you guys are doing? Do you use those applications at all?
Jill Pellegrino 10:56 It's absolutely something that was top of mind for us, that we're starting to take advantage of. We are now in exploration phase of looking at, how do we do that upfront in the advertising, it's, it's something that a lot of other industries are taking full advantage of now. And, you know, in clinical trials, we're a little bit more limited working within, you know, IRB approvals and everything. So we're going to start doing that, probably very soon. But the one area I would add that we also focus a lot on is, you know, the advertising is just the first part. And be able to find that population we our organization, spends a lot on time, on making sure that we are honing that population in on the most qualified patients that are most motivated and appropriate for a trial. So we have multiple steps of pre screening that we do before we hand a patient over. So the first step is they respond to our ad, but then they go through multiple stages to see if they are clinically qualified and appropriate for a protocol. So the first step is that they can do a self reported questionnaire online with us. The second step is that we can follow up with a clinical phone screening, where we would rely on some of our medical staff to go in a little bit more depth to better understand if they're qualified. And then the third step is we have a new product called EMR capture and intelligence, and this is an area where we're relying on AI. So this is something we just released this year. It's available in the US. And what that is, is patients will give us that consent, authorization to be able to get their medical records on their behalf, and our technology taps into the Health Information Exchange to be able to get their longitudinal medical records. And then the technology partner we work with has AI that overlays that, that summarizes those records and puts it into a very user friendly format for the sites to see. And it's, it's all very, very fast and where medical records are something the sites are going to get from the patients anyway. But what this is allowing us to do is it's allowing us to facilitate that much faster, get the patients into the sites, take that work off the sites, and then also it allows us to do that review before we even send the patients, so that we're only sending the most qualified patients to the sites,
Megan Antonelli 13:19 right? And so I imagine that results in a lot of the timeline reductions that you're seeing around building those patients. Yeah. Are there any other key factors in that, or would you say that that that covers it? Yeah.
Jill Pellegrino 13:34 I mean, so making sure that we're sending as qualified patients as possible is probably one of the most critical things, because, you know, the sites are, they're very, very busy. They're working on many studies. They're working with different partners, and they don't always have the time to reach out to these referrals. So it really just improves that relationship with them, and their engagement with the patients, the more qualified patients. So that's a real critical thing, but we also focus on on the customer service aspect, I would say. So we have another service called Engagement Services that's made up of two different teams. One team is focusing on the patients, and the other team is focusing on the sites, and they're really there to facilitate all of the administrative and logistics to make sure that those patients are seen at the sites. The sites like it, because depending on you know, how many resources they have dedicated to the study, they they appreciate the extra support for audit equipment to help schedule the patients or answering the patient's questions. And then the patients like it, because clinical trials are usually very new for them. They have a lot of questions, and they're not always able to get all the information from the site, so audit equipment can really act as a intermediary at that point to really help them get comfortable at the trial and get all of their questions answered.
Megan Antonelli 14:54 Yeah. I mean, in my experience, I feel like that's a lot of where it breaks down right when you. Yeah, you get into, you know, you want to be a participant in the clinical trial, but then that communication back and forth with the site, about the questions, about the appointments, about, you know, all of that, where the sites are busy, as you said, they have lots of things they're managing. And you know, whether it's, you know, the coordinator, you know, the clinical research coordinator on site, you know, managing all these patients with, you know, cancelations. And, you know, it's never quite the priority, as, you know, your ear infection or whatever, whatever gets you to the doctor. So those appointments get canceled often, and it's a lot, a lot involved there. So that's great in terms of, you know, other, you know, KPIs, obviously, timeline and getting, getting the number of patients, and what are some of the other, you know, measures of success that you guys are looking at, beyond some of the traditional recruitment KPIs.
Jill Pellegrino 15:52 Yeah, so I you know our our customers are the pharmaceutical companies, but we feel that we have secondary customers and other stakeholders that we're always measuring, and that's the patients in the sites. And you know, ultimately, our mission is to be able to help patients get connected to clinical trials. So we're often measuring, you know, how how many, how interested the patients are, how often they're responding to us. Are we bringing value to them? Are they opting out of our messaging and everything. So they're absolutely an important stakeholder that we're always monitoring. And then the other one is the clinical research sites. At the end of the day, we're providing a service and a value to them, and we have to partner with them in order to be successful and bring the patients into trials. So we're, we've worked with over 1000s of sites, and we're really, we're really pleased to see that a lot of sites think highly about recruitment. A lot of our business actually comes from them, referring us back to the pharmaceutical companies.
Megan Antonelli 16:53 No, that's great. That's always, that is always a great testament to the success of a program around you know, one of the things that we talk about, you know, for the last few years has been around equity and healthcare equity, and, you know, we talked a lot about sort of lack of representation in clinical trials. And I imagine that because you're sort of expanding that pool through digital advertising through the you know, broader reach that you have some ways to kind of ensure that there's a more diverse patient representation. Has that been a key factor in this? Yeah,
Jill Pellegrino 17:32 absolutely on, and it's it's really important to us as well, especially with it being such a challenge in clinical trials, where it is very biased population. So there's a lot of initiatives now and a lot of push to try to increase diversity in clinical trials. And so we are always making sure that our ads, our imagery and our messaging is really being customized and tailored to different populations, you know, around the unique needs that each population has, as well as what are their unique concerns and everything. So we do find by being able to go direct to patient and being able to customize who we're targeting and everything, we can be really effective in increasing diversity in clinical trials, a lot of times, that's when customers are calling us when they really want us to help intentionally drive certain populations in their trials. So on average, about 48% across all of our trials are non Caucasian, which we're really proud of, because that's, you know, we hire them the industry average for clinical trials. That's great, yeah.
Megan Antonelli 18:36 Now that's great. And that I mean that, you know, I think you were at CVS Health, and you know, we saw a big uptick and a lot of interest, you know, both from Walgreens and CVS around, you know, kind of building their teams around clinical trials and how they could get involved, which seemed to make logical sense, as so many things do in healthcare. It makes sense. And then until you actually try, and it's much harder than it appears. But, you know, tell me a little bit about, you know, that experience and kind of any learnings that came out of that, because I imagine it, you know, there were some surprises. Yeah,
Jill Pellegrino 19:10 I am, I think that the biggest, like, the biggest learning for me, that was most eye opening with my experience there is really how interested and motivated and excited the patient community is about clinical trials at CVS Health, you know, we had a population one 30 million Americans that we were interacting with and trying to partner with trials, and So we would do a lot of surveys and research with that population to better understand whether, you know, clinical trials was something that they wanted to participate in. And not surprisingly, most people would say that or even heard of a clinical trial. And this is even after the pandemic, and where more people than average, were starting to. Feel, you know, understand clinical trials, but once they were educated on it and better, learned more about the opportunity that it helped, that it has for individuals to participate, there was a lot of interest. So that really just reinforced and emphasized, you know, my passion for trying to develop solutions to help a wider community get access to clinical trials.
Megan Antonelli 20:29 Yeah, it is interesting. How it it's, you know, when you think about the traditional problems of or the traditional challenges of why patient recruitment is hard, so much of it is education, access, the understanding, then there's a trust element. And I think certainly at the time, you know, and I've heard this, you know, CVS is one of the trusted, most trusted brands in healthcare, right? So that, you know, access to education through organizations like that. But also, to your point, you know where, where they are, and for better or for worse, people trust the internet at the time, but you know, getting them that education and then getting them the access to the physicians who are doing the research is so important. What about, you know, in turn? Yeah, we talked a little bit about AI, and I think that you know, that ability to both screen patients you know, using using that, but also even with the tools to kind of have conversations with them, to educate them. Are there any other you know, innovations that you see, maybe not even just for clinical trial recruitment, but within healthcare, that you think will will really kind of accelerate this and help people get get more involved in the clinical trials that Yeah,
Jill Pellegrino 21:45 so I, you know, technology, as I share, is a must for us, with with with auto recruitment on I'm actually kind of blown away at how many organizations don't rely on technology to track the success, and you know what's happening in their recruitment campaigns, and so we track every single step along the way, from the time that person responds to the ad to the time that they are entered into the trial. So that's an area that we're constantly investing in, and trying to find ways to optimize all of the steps there's still a lot of inefficiency in the process. So we're looking at ways that we can lean on technology to really help shorten those time periods that patients are waiting to get through each step, coordinating the communications that we're having with the patients, that the sites are having with the patients. So there, there's still a lot of opportunity to invest in improvements there. And then the other areas that we're looking at is, how do we extend, how do we better extend the value that we have in being able to engage patients directly and being able to interact with them and get their their medical records. If you think about just research in general, and all healthcare research in general, not just clinical trials, I find it I'm always very, very disheartened and at the fact that we have so many different improvements and AI and technology, but we can't really take advantage of it with healthcare data, because It's in silos, because of privacy and HIPAA regulation. So the way you can really open that up is, you know, the only person that can really open up is the patients themselves. And you know what I've learned in my experience at CVS and all recruitment is patients are very motivated to participate in that. So we're thinking about like, how do we put them at the center of the research? How do we help them enable the access to their data so that can help with clinical trial participation. But also, you know, jet research in general,
Megan Antonelli 23:48 yeah, yeah, I think it is. And I always think about this, having worked, you know, on the pharma side and the payer side, on the and the provider side that you have, you know, these silos, these stakeholders, the data lives in different forms in all of these organizations. And then, you know, with, without connecting it in some way, we lose so much, right and and, of course, patient privacy is incredibly important, but when it comes down to, you know, when you're sick, you know you're what you care about is, is your doctors and getting the best medicine, and how that happens, not so much, you know, the privacy part of it. So it's, it's such a, you know, it's, you know, it's a rock and a hard place, for sure, and it continues to be there. But I do see, you know, sort of glimmers of hope, but also that need for the collaboration, and that's what we talk about a lot at health impact in terms of that collaboration between providers and pharma, you know, and the patient. And as you said, if you don't, if you put the patient at the center, then that's all where, you know, then it can all work. You know, that's crazy, yeah, for sure. Um, and, you know, I mean, at a little you talked a little bit about HIPAA and compliance around that. And you guys do also when you work, I imagine internationally as well. Yeah,
Jill Pellegrino 25:11 we have, we have capabilities in 50 countries, but we have a proven experience of 37 Oh,
Megan Antonelli 25:18 wow, yeah, yeah. Now, that's amazing. I think you know, when you know, we always like to talk about kind of, if you could change anything, and sometimes, you know, I don't know if that, if we've just answered that question, but when you think about kind of what in healthcare could change, that would make you know, it better for the patients to get better access to clinical trials so that they can get that research and move that research forward. You know what comes to mind? Yeah,
Jill Pellegrino 25:48 I think about, you know, I've seen in my experience, and as we're talking here, that by enabling that patient, putting them at the center and go and direct a patient, you can see some really impactful results. Not only is it really beneficial to the patients, but you can see real meaningful results in the clinical trials, where we've been able to cut timelines in half, which is pretty significant cost savings that go into that. So I really wish and would love to see, how can we as an industry, really change the way we're thinking about budgeting and feasibility and study planning, so that from the very beginning, when you're starting, like from the very beginning, to figure out exactly how you're going to conduct this trial and run this trial, if you design it around the fact that you want to do a Direct to patient strategy, as opposed to always making an add on or rescue solution, you know, you can really run the trial more efficiently and take advantage of some of these strategies that are allowing more patients to participate in research, yeah,
Megan Antonelli 26:53 and enable that, you know, sort of real world evidence to actually be used, right? I mean, I think, you know, it still lives in my head as a bit of a buzzword, you know, real world evidence, because I just feel like we're not even allowed to use it so to get to that place where we can. And, you know, we talk to a lot of digital health companies who struggle with this, trying to do trials, trying to do research, you know, but it is so expensive. So you know that around that budget and how you can cut costs, and you know, ensure that the patients that you need the most are in in you know, who need, who both need the solution the most or the treatment the most, are actively participating and engaged, you know, so absolutely. And then we always talk about good things. So tell me about, you know, is there something you know that you guys are working on, or, just in general, on health care that you're super excited about?
Jill Pellegrino 27:50 Yeah, um, I think I was so with, you know, we're working on clinical trials, but we're also a digital advertising company. So I get really, really excited about a lot of the advancements in digital advertising. So there, you know, there's just so many different ways and more efficient ways that you can target and reach populations. We're looking at a lot of other industries now, like retail and banking and some of the advancements they've made and their advertising to really learn from that, and think about, how can we better place ads in front of patients to make it more, you know, more tailored to them and more relevant to them? So that's some of the stuff I personally get get excited about, and really looking forward to being able to drive some of that. It brings some of that innovation to clinical trials.
Megan Antonelli 28:39 Yeah, it is. I mean, pharmaceutical advertising in general is such an interesting thing. I mean, obviously we all sit and we see the, you know, TV commercials that are still, you know, and there's, you know, of of the advertisers, they're still using everything, right? You know, TV print, you know, radio banners, you know, everything, and certainly for patient recruitment. And ultimately, it's because it works, you know, but it isn't. It's an interesting area, as you can get, you know, more targeted and reach the people who need it most. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Jill, it's been a pleasure meeting you and learning about auto recruitment and the great work that you guys are doing so thanks. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me absolutely well. That concludes our conversation about clinical trial recruitment and auto recruitment. Data driven approach demonstrates how AI and targeted digital engagement can dramatically improve trial efficiency and patient access for more insights and on healthcare innovation, subscribe to digital health talks and visit health impact live.com this is Megan Antonelli, signing off. Thanks for listening and join us next week as we continue exploring technology's role in advancing healthcare delivery.
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