How Can A Doctor Who Is Interested In Clinical Research Get Involved?

I have been on a frenzy lately creating content and looking for solutions regarding patient recruitment in clinical trials. There are, of course, multiple methods of improving study participation rates amongst trial participants. I believe the 2 most important strategies are in this order:

1.) Getting more physicians involved in conducting their own clinical studies at their own research sites

and

2.) Improving our content marketing efforts when it comes to creating patient facing information

I will focus on #2 in my next post, but this post will be all about strategy #1-getting more physicians involved in clinical research.

Most physicians have a natural interest in clinical research. It’s part of their nature. Most, according to my own experiences also have many false assumptions and unrealistic fears about research- assumptions such as “I will have mountains of extra paperwork to deal with”, or “I will be audited by the FDA”, or “my colleague tried research and she failed”…the objections go on and on.

In my experiences consulting with research-naive physicians I have encountered many of these objections and some. Many are usually relieved to hear that there exists such a thing as a study coordinator that will handle most of this “mountains of paperwork” for them. They also typically don’t realize that a CRA will be appointed to their site in order to ensure that the study is being conducted according to the protocol and Good Clinical Practice standards- and even better- this occurs at no cost to them! It is true that the Principal Investigator of the trial is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the study at their facility, there are many best practices that have been put into place by other successful Investigators that these physicians should learn from. My consulting firm would be happy to help you get started off on the right track, and I have many videos on my blog and Youtube channel which can help you out.

The question once a physician’s objections have been successfully addressed typically is “how can I get started?” In the above video I suggest several strategies for getting started. You can start off as a sub-investigator for another research clinic to learn the process without necessarily having the responsibility of overseeing the entire conduct of the clinical trial.

Another option is starting out on your own-at your existing private practice facility-with Phase 4 studies. I wrote a recent LinkedIn post on this subject here.

In summary, it is our duty as researchers to get as many physicians interested in participating in clinical research as possible if we are truly interested in solving a major part of the patient recruitment problem. It is unfortunate that the majority of physicians who do give clinical research a try end up never doing a second study ever again, and this is certainly another topic for another day but I believe it stems from the fact that the physicians often go into these endeavors “flying blind” and are often unaware of the resources out there that are available to them.