Clinical Trial Patient Recruitment With Strategic Precision
Many enrollment campaigns purchase wide visibility, then wait to learn if patients respond. Healthcare Success develops a recruiting engine around the demands of your protocol, the patients you need and each site, validates it at pilot sites, and expands what performs, following every referral all the way to randomization.
- More than 100 clinical trials supported by our clinical trial leadership
- More than 20 years exclusively in healthcare and life sciences
- Senior strategists lead every program, from protocol to randomization
Why Enrollment Falls Behind
According to Tufts CSDD, a typical study sees 11% of its sites enroll zero patients, while 37% more miss their enrollment targets. For a Phase II or Phase III trial, each stalled day carries roughly $40,000 in direct expenses, with Tufts putting the forgone revenue at around $800,000 daily.
Often the problem is not a lack of patients. Sites work through their own lists too quickly. Qualified people do not learn about the study, or they learn about it and pause. Strong referrals wait in line for days with no return call. These are gaps in strategy, and more media spend will not close them.
Why Sponsors Bring In a Specialized Recruitment Partner
CROs exist to run trials at scale: overseeing sites, tracking progress, gathering data and handling regulatory requirements in multiple countries. Recruiting patients sits within that broader scope, and it is often treated as one national push built around a single message, stretched as far as the budget will carry it. Sponsors see little of how well it works, and portions of the work frequently end up with outside vendors.
This strategy widens exposure across the board. What it isn't designed to do is locate the exact patient an underperforming site requires.
Pharmaceutical and biotech sponsors turn to Healthcare Success when a study calls for capabilities that sit outside what their staff or CRO can deliver: identifying, engaging and converting the patients who fit each site. Our model is a focused group of senior specialists. Every program is built around one protocol, its target population and the sites facing the greatest need, and we coordinate with your CRO so that recruitment and clinical operations stay aligned.
Strategic Creative for the Hardest Moment
For many patients, news of a clinical trial arrives during one of life's hardest chapters. A frightening diagnosis has just landed on them or on someone close, and they are searching for clarity about the road ahead. Outreach that opens with protocol details and scheduling logistics overlooks that reality entirely. As a creative agency backed by serious strategic strength, we respond to it directly, producing work that speaks to patients and caregivers on an emotional level, addresses their fears with honesty and offers a genuine reason to move forward. That human bond is what carries awareness all the way to a screening visit, and it explains in large part why our approach is engineered for higher conversion.
For more than 20 years, our writing has reached patients during some of their hardest times, among them people looking for addiction and mental health treatment. That same level of care guides our clinical trial work, because we see trials as the way diseases are finally defeated. Each participant brings a cure one step nearer, and being part of that work is something we are passionate about.
Build It, Prove It, Then Scale It
Typical CRO recruitment launches at full volume from day one. One broad national campaign goes live across every site simultaneously, spending is committed up front, and you learn what performs only after a large share of that money is gone. Healthcare Success takes another path. We build a recruiting engine around your specific patient population, pilot it with a small group of sites, and scale just the proven elements across your full network.
Less Waste
We hold back broad spending until the system demonstrates it can generate screening visits. From there, dollars flow toward the sites with the greatest need for patients, rather than being divided equally across all locations regardless of demand.
Higher Conversion
We design each part of the system to move people from interest to action: outreach at the local level that patients know and believe in, physicians who send qualified patients your way, messaging that connects with people facing a difficult diagnosis, and site coordinators equipped to turn those referrals into screening visits.
Fully Measurable
Our team monitors each referral across the full path from initial click through randomization, with site level visibility built on the enrollment data your sites provide. Reports arrive every week showing cost and conversion for each stage, giving you a clear picture of the return on every dollar spent.
Built to Scale
Once the engine proves itself with your patient population, we expand it one site and one region at a time, guided by performance data rather than assumptions.
How It Works
Build the Engine
Your enrollment model gets built backward from the start, anchored to the total number of randomizations your study requires. From there, we look closely at how patients and caregivers think, what they worry about, and where they search online. Those findings shape a distinct engine built for every site. Each one brings together local visibility, a system for physician referrals, patient messaging, and an onsite workflow that converts interest into screening visits.
Prove It
The model goes live first at a small group of pilot sites. From there, we experiment across channels, messaging, and geographic focus, checking each decision against true enrollment figures. Those results reveal the mix that drives screening visits while keeping the cost per randomized patient as low as possible.
Scale It
After the winning approach is clear, we scale it across every site. Spending follows the strongest performance. You receive weekly reporting that covers each location. Lessons from each study carry into the next, giving it a stronger starting point.
What Powers the Engine
The 20 years of hospital, physician practice, and physician network marketing behind every part of this engine represent experience that a CRO recruitment team is not built around.
Every Site Marketed Like a Healthcare Provider
People decide on a clinical trial much like they decide on a physician: nearby, simple to reach, and worthy of their trust. We present every study location as a distinct local healthcare brand. That work spans local search, maps, directory profiles, patient reviews, and paid advertising, built with the same discipline we bring to healthcare organizations operating dozens to hundreds of locations.
Referring Physicians Around Every Site
Healthcare Success has focused on physicians from the very beginning, and nearly half of the clients we serve rely on our programs to connect with doctors and other healthcare professionals. We build physician referral strategies for each site, including outreach plans, peer to peer materials and regular updates aimed at the doctors with the greatest likelihood of referring eligible patients.
A Front Desk That Converts Referrals
When phone handling falls short, up to half of inquiries from new patients can be lost before a visit is booked. Our team has spent years showing provider teams how to convert caller interest into scheduled visits. Today we bring that discipline to research sites. The method pairs call audits with mystery shopping, adds scripts for calls, and gives coordinators practical coaching, so each inquiry receives the follow through it deserves.
AI Visibility Intelligence
People considering clinical research, along with their caregivers, now turn to tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews with their questions about studies. Our role is getting your trial featured in the responses those platforms deliver. Drawing on proprietary healthcare AI intelligence from Inlets.ai, we show you precisely how these tools describe your study and your sites today, plus what must improve. Backed by 20 years of published healthcare content and established search authority, our approach performs across both traditional SEO and generative engine optimization (GEO).
Multicultural and Bilingual Reach
Your trial depends on enrolling people who mirror the populations living around every location. We combine our creative with multicultural and bilingual outreach so your recruitment connects with that entire spectrum of patients, and every message is developed in line with FDA guidance on recruitment advertising.
Sponsor Grade Enrollment Strategy
A strategist who has supported recruitment for more than 100 clinical trials directs every program, building recruitment plans from a sponsor's perspective, keeping both the enrollment timeline and the commercial outlook for your product in focus.
How We Compare
| AREA | TYPICAL CRO RECRUITMENT | HEALTHCARE SUCCESS |
|---|---|---|
| Launch | Everywhere at once | An engine built for your patient population, proven at pilot sites, then scaled |
| Budget | Committed up front across every market | Follows results, site by site |
| Targeting | One national campaign | Each site marketed like a local healthcare provider |
| Creative | One message for every market | Strategic creative that connects with newly diagnosed patients and caregivers |
| Referral handling | Referrals passed to the site | Call audits, scripts and coordinator coaching at the site |
| Measurement | Leads delivered | Cost and conversion at every stage, by site, every week |
| Team | One service among many, often subcontracted | A dedicated team of senior healthcare marketing specialists |
Led by a Recruitment Strategist With More Than 100 Trials
Nico Coetzee, President of Healthcare Success, leads our clinical trial practice. Prior to Healthcare Success, he served as chief marketing officer for a patient recruitment firm and as head of media within a global contract research organization. Under his leadership, teams have supported recruitment for more than 100 clinical trials, spanning early phase research through Phase III, with work that includes COVID-19 vaccine trials and multiyear global programs reaching North America, South America, Europe and Asia Pacific.
He has also steered treatments from the clinical development stage all the way to FDA approval and entry into the market, which means he builds recruitment plans around the sponsor's complete timeline and commercial objectives.
Therapeutic Experience
Our clinical trial leaders know the therapeutic categories in which sponsors most often need patients:
- Oncology and hematology: non small cell lung, thyroid, breast, ovarian and cervical cancers, multiple myeloma, and basket trials for rare genetic markers such as NTRK, ROS1 and ALK
- Neurology: Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis and Meniere's disease
- Infectious disease and vaccines, including COVID-19 vaccine trials
- Pediatrics: multiple sclerosis and bipolar disorder in children and teens
- Psychiatry and behavioral health: bipolar disorder, plus Healthcare Success's long record of reaching people who need addiction and mental health treatment
- Immunology, allergy and dermatology: severe allergies, atopic dermatitis and rosacea
- Endocrinology and rare disease: Cushing's syndrome and other rare conditions
Our work covers Phase I through Phase III trials as well as observational studies and patient registries, whether the program runs in one country or across global sites.
Clinical Trial Recruitment FAQ
Q: What does a clinical trial recruitment agency do that a CRO doesn't?
Your CRO runs the study itself: overseeing sites, keeping watch over trial activity, gathering data, and handling regulatory requirements. A recruitment partner concentrates on the people who might join: learning what drives them, developing IRB approved advertising, placing and managing campaigns, designing the pre-screener, and confirming that every referral gets proper follow up. Many sponsors bring in both. Our team coordinates with your CRO and tracks our performance against the very enrollment goals you share.
Q: Does recruitment advertising need IRB approval?
Absolutely. Under FDA guidance, recruitment advertising is considered the opening step of informed consent. So each ad, landing page, and pre-screener has to clear IRB review before launch. From day one we fold that step into the plan and send materials for approval in grouped batches rather than one at a time.
Q: What happens after a patient finishes the pre-screener?
When a patient appears eligible, we send them to the nearest study site or to a call center, depending on which model your trial follows. Many studies lose participants at exactly this stage, because a referral can sit untouched for days or simply never receive outreach. Our team tracks each referral through to site contact and partners with yours to resolve any that get stuck along the way.
Q: How do you measure a recruitment campaign?
Each week, you get reporting broken out by site: how many completed the screener, how many qualified, how many were reached, how many visits were booked, why candidates failed screening, and randomizations as sites submit them. Impressions and clicks create activity at the top, but they still cannot confirm enrollment at a given site.
Q: How do you recruit for rare disease trials?
When only a few hundred people across the country qualify, wide reaching campaigns drain money without reaching them. Instead, we connect through the places those patients already trust: advocacy groups, condition focused networks, and the physicians treating them, supplying IRB approved materials these partners can distribute on their own.
Q: How is AI search changing clinical trial recruitment?
People facing a diagnosis, together with caregivers, now bring questions to ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews about clinical trials tied to that condition. Those systems lift answers from pages that spell out who qualifies, the visit schedule, and where sites are located. Healthcare Success creates that content for trial sponsors and research locations. A sponsor discovered Healthcare Success through ChatGPT only recently.
Q: Who leads clinical trial recruitment at Healthcare Success?
Nico Coetzee serves as our President. Before coming to Healthcare Success, he held the role of chief marketing officer at a patient recruitment company and led media for a global contract research organization. Teams under his direction have supported recruitment for more than 100 clinical trials spanning pediatrics, infectious disease, oncology, immunology and neurology, among them COVID-19 vaccine trials.
Behind on Enrollment?
Share the details about your protocol, your site network, and current enrollment performance. We will pinpoint where referred patients fall out of the process and outline the first adjustments we recommend.
Contact Healthcare Success when you need a clinical trial recruitment partner that understands your patients. We offer dedicated campaign management, patient-centric digital advertising, and more than two decades of healthcare marketing experience—all focused on helping you hit your enrollment targets on time.
