Customer stories
Unlocking research opportunities with Recruit
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Primary care has a unique opportunity to revolutionise clinical trials in the UK – transforming trial recruitment using patient health data and championing representative research through greater participant diversity. Our Recruit solution, available in EMIS Web®, is enabling primary care teams to embed research delivery into day-to-day care. We spoke to one practice about their experience using the platform for clinical trial recruitment.
Serving around 6000 patients in suburban Northeast London, Glebelands Practice has been actively engaged in supporting clinical research opportunities within their community for several years. However, their involvement in these projects was hampered by the need for time-consuming manual searches and tasks, which forced them to pick and choose opportunities according to capacity.
Hearing about Recruit from an Optum newsletter, Practice Manager Steffi Fisher jumped at an opportunity to use our integrated tool to support clinical trial recruitment in a quick and simple way, where searches are automated within EMIS Web at the touch of a button.
I just thought, oh wow that’s going to be easy – I don’t have to do all the searches, there’s a potential income, it’s on Optum and it’s almost done for you. So yeah, I signed up!”
Streamlining trial recruitment
Activating Recruit for your practice is a quick and simple task, and once complete, you’ll be able to see the clinical trials on our platform that are recruiting participants in your area. For each trial, you’ll be able to review the study overview and eligibility criteria and see the number of potentially eligible patients within your data as well as the potential reimbursement earnings.
“We like research, we like to do it”, Steffi commented. The team at Glebelands Practice are keen to empower their patients to become involved in initiatives to improve healthcare and trial new treatment options.
We’ve had comments from patients who’ve been involved before and thought it was good. So being a practice that listens to our patients we thought that it would be a good thing to offer.”
Effortless implementation
Signing up in 2022, the Glebelands Practice has already supported two studies and are in the process of inviting patients for a third. Explaining the process, Steffi commented “my job is to press a few buttons, go through the list and make some decisions, which is actually quite minor compared to what we normally have to do for these things”.
We understand there may be certain patients who you’d like to exclude from invitations, for a whole host of reasons. That’s why we’ve made it easy to exclude specific patients from your lists using the ‘exclude’ button or by deselecting them before you send out any messages regarding the study.
Early success
Once the invitations were sent, Steffi observed a smooth process with no noticeable increase in calls to the practice. Over time, the platform's data showed that while some patients had chosen to disregard or decline the invitations, a good number had eagerly accepted and gone on to screening at the trial site.
Of the patients invited to these two initial clinical trials looking into new asthma treatments, Glebelands Practice had a notable 15% acceptance rate, demonstrating that their patient population is willing and interested in being a part of these opportunities. In conversations with some of the patients who declined, Steffi learned that time constraints were a primary reason for their decision. However, it's worth noting that these patients expressed a continued willingness to be contacted for future studies, indicating their ongoing interest in contributing to medical research.
Activate today
The team are looking forward to offering more clinical research opportunities to their patient population as more studies continue to be added to the Recruit platform.
It’s just pressing a few buttons and going through the list. It's quite nice income if you get lots of people taking it up.”
Recruit is accessible to all EMIS Web practices in England and is available in EMIS-X. To activate today, follow our step-by-step guide here.