A clinical trial newsletter is a low tech tool that can help you drive site engagement and patient recruitment.
A Sponsor or CRO may invest heavily to “communicate” with sites about their clinical trial. Maybe their people are getting on planes or trains to visit site investigators and clinical research coordinators. In real life conversations do matter a lot and can be extremely effective. But in-person visits are generally harder to scale and sustain.
An alternative is the old fashioned Clinical Trial Newsletter. In my experience, a quarterly newsletter is a must for most clinical trials, if not a more frequent monthly or bi-monthly (twice a month) newsletter.
A newsletter is not a “thing” you do as part of your clinical trial. Creating a newsletter requires a lot of thought, creativity, and focus. It can generally take 8-16 hours to get a newsletter drafted, reviewed, finalized, and published. The hardest part, in my experience, has been coming up with content ideas that would resonate with the sites.
Here are 5 content ideas for your next clinical trial newsletter:
1. Recognize clinical trial sites for their contributions
Whether your site is in start-up, enrollment, or data collection phase, there is always opportunity to recognize and thank your clinical trial sites.
If your study is in the start-up phase, congratulate sites when they get invited and selected on a given trial. Or when the site is activated to enroll participants in a clinical trial.
If your study is in the enrollment phase, it is a great gesture to congratulate the top enrolling sites. You can mention the enrollment data by volume (number of participants) or enrollment rate (participants enrolled per week or per month). Because not all sites are generally activated for enrollment at the same time, my preference is to present a table from highest to lowest enrolling sites by enrollment rate.
If your site is in the data collection phase, highlighting site compliance would be incredibly motivating and powerful. For example, most studies care about follow-up participant compliance. You can list the top sites with the highest follow-up compliance i.e. lowest number of missed visits.
Personally, I always like to mention full names of Investigator and Clinical Research Coordinators (CRCs) who have made meaningful contributions towards patient recruitment or collecting high quality. Public recognition goes a long way!
2. Add a photo (or two). It helps your newsletter become more human!
With travel back in full swing, there are plenty of opportunities to get photos during site initiation visits, monitoring visits, investigator meetings, senior management site visits and more. Or you can ask the site staff to take their team photo and send it over to you.
I’ve seldom seen a Sponsor or CRO include their own photo(s) on a newsletter. For example, if you’re sharing Sponsor or CRO team contact information in your newsletter, consider including their headshots of the project team members next to their names. As they say, it helps to put a face to a name.
In my experience, photos bring warmth to the overall newsletter. Clinical trial content can be quite dense with the scientific and operational information. Photos will serve as an interesting element to the overall look and feel of your newsletter.
3. Publish a Q&A with the Study/Site Investigator(s) or Medical Monitor to answer all the burning questions from your sites
Sites are looking for non-ambiguous responses to their clinical trial questions. Take some time to track top Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and feature them in a Question & Answer (Q&A) format in your next clinical trial newsletter.
For example, if you get a question about an inclusion/ exclusion from a clinical trial site, consider including the question and your response in the newsletter so other sites can benefit from it.
I’ve found that Sponsors or CROs tend to be conservative when it comes to sharing their library of study FAQs with the sites. But it’s a disservice to the study by withholding information that can be beneficial to other sites. In general, I’d err on the side of oversharing than undersharing information with participating clinical trial sites.
Another interesting strategy is to interview a site or study investigator and publish their interview in the newsletter. The process is simple – you record the interview on your phone or any other device, transcribe the interview using one of the transcription tools or services, and then clean up the transcript before publishing the interview in your newsletter.
4. Add well-designed graphs and tables that highlight study progress and milestones
When designing a clinical trial newsletter, you want to share that clinical trial information and updates in a format that is easy to understand. A graph or figure will do the trick. You can also use tables.
You can create visually appealing images to share clinical trial progress (start-up, enrollment, data collection) with participating sites. For example, you can show cumulative recruitment progress month over month. Sites want to know the health of the study and see how their contributions fit into the bigger picture.
A great resource to turn your excel data into visuals is a book titled, “Storytelling with Data” by Cole Knaflic. In fact, on the book’s website there is a link to a google drive where you can access the templates for various graphs and figures. You can then update the Excel templates with data from your clinical trial to create your very own beautiful visual.
5. Include your team contact information
One of the repeat sections on a clinical trial newsletter can be the “Team Contact Information” section. It is a valuable section for site personnel because it tells them exactly who at the Sponsor or CRO they need to contact in case they have a clinical trial question.
When there is staff turnover or if team assignments at Sponsor or CRO change, it’s hard to keep track of who the site needs to contact in case of questions. This is where the contact information comes handy because it’s kept current and communicated frequently with sites via the newsletter.
I always encourage Sponsors and CROs to share the project team’s complete contact information including full names, email addresses, and cell phone numbers. I’d like to emphasize that it is important to share cell phone numbers (not desk phone numbers only) with site personnel. By sharing cell phone numbers, it makes it easy for sites to contact you when they have a question. Don’t worry about site’s abusing this method of communication because it is quite rare that sites will call or text you on your cell phone unless you’re unreachable via email, if there is an emergency on the clinical trial, or they cannot connect with you via some other asynchronous method such the electronic data capture system.
Above all, stay consistent and share your clinical trial newsletters regularly. A high quality, quarterly newsletter is just fine for most clinical trials.
