The Communicator

NGP. How do you strive to strike a balance between innovative technology and traditional health communication strategies? And which works best?

We recognize that some of today’s new ideas will be tomorrow’s best practices. Knowing when and how to balance innovative and traditional recruitment approaches comes down to good judgment, risk management and confidence.

You need to be able to rely on what has worked for you, robust recruitment campaign experience, as well as what hadn’t worked in the past and why. The more you have to draw from the better you can accurately predict the feasibility and potential advantages of an innovative strategy’s success. You will also be better able to insert the new technology or recruitment approach in with the more traditional. We find that piloting an approach, supported by contingency plans, is both a creative and risk-managed way to implement it.

Bottom line with any technological or innovative strategy is that it is delivered with traditional, sound client service, and meeting the client’s objective as its goal.

NGP. How does MMG go about creating the right recruitment communications strategy for a particular clinical study?

Strategies are based on our knowledge of how the disease or condition truly impacts people – the people who have the disease for which a treatment is being studied as well as their family and caregivers, and attending healthcare professionals. Foremost to every strategy are these personal considerations. They dictate the mediums that work, the timing of delivering the messages, and the messages themselves.

Additional considerations in creating overall strategy include the incidence rate of the disease in the population, the time of year the study is being conducted, the timeline for enrollment and participation, and many other factors such as region or location of study sites, and more. It is a mix of both very personal and logistical considerations.

NGP. How do you explain the benefits of having staff with medical expertise when developing and delivering your recruitment campaigns?

Medical expertise is essential to informing the strategists and other team members with details – unknown by most others – about the disease, the protocol, the treatment, the type of healthcare professional who treats these patients, and the patients themselves. Armed with this knowledge, we are assured of creating appropriate and compelling messages and preparing for and overcoming recruitment and retention barriers that we might otherwise not have done as efficiently.

Depending on the particular study or protocol, having medical expertise can make or break the effectiveness of a recruitment campaign, particular strategy or tactic. For example, medical experts can be excellent patient advocates, used in grassroots outreach campaigns and used to prescreen potential participants for complex trials. Our medical experts also assist in writing scientific articles and CME programs to help inform health professionals about the study. These strategies would be less effective, or not able to be incorporated, without the knowledge and understanding of medical insight.

NGP. In targeting a specific patient audience, how do you select between television, radio and print publications when getting your message across?

Our recruitment campaigns are research-based. We’ll often start campaign development by analyzing data from previous trials we’ve supported and conducting target audience research – focus groups, surveys, etc. – to fill in any gaps in our knowledge base. To gather hard metrics on medium effectiveness, we typically conduct a test phase or advertising pilot, often 2 weeks in length, to assess not only advertising medium, but also the best markets. The end result is a highly targeted, cost-effective campaign that often includes a combination of TV, radio and print (and sometimes one or none of those).

Typically, television advertising is not effective in patient recruitment to oncology trials but might be a core strategy for another, as it was for a pediatric depression study we recently supported.

NGP. Delivering messages about clinical study participation to small segments of the population, as determined by the specific disease being studied and its corresponding patient population, is a tall order. What future strategies do you have planned to reach both narrow and broad patient population audiences?

Well, we have several initiatives underway to address both underserved populations (minorities) and diseases that do not affect large numbers of people worldwide. First, with our sister company, FindingCures, we are bringing to market a program that will access 15,000 minority PIs (principal investigators) across various therapeutic areas. These investigators have mostly minority patient populations. Our program will ensure that the PI’s are trained in conducting clinical trials, have the necessary staff (study coordinators) to participate in the research, and be able to search each PI’s patient records electronically to identify all eligible patients for a particular clinical trial.

This way, our efforts are focused on pre-identified eligible patients because of our ability to search electronic medical histories – in full compliance with the latest patient privacy legislation.

Another initiative with FindingCures is building a network of private practice research physicians in disease areas with patients who are typically difficult to identify and reach. These include people with Crohn’s disease, Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis and various types of Cancers. This network of physicians will upload transcription data into our master database called a CCR (Collaborative Clinical Research) hub. The database houses the de-identified records of all of the physicians so that we are able to search the CCR hub on exact inclusion/exclusion criteria to determine protocol feasibility, site selection and patient identification.

Many physicians have few numbers of patients with some of these conditions and the ability to find each and every patient with that disease by searching medical records truly changes the approach and ability to help our clients complete their clinical studies, and ultimately get advancements in medicine to market.

NGP. You say that most of your campaigns are research-based. How does this research pay off in your PR work?

Research is vitally important to the strategies we develop for our clients. Compressed clinical study time frames and budgetary restrictions only enhance the need to guide interventions and strategies with formative research. Research more than pays for itself by taking the guesswork out of creative designs and intervention strategies.

We make every effort to understand exactly how our interventions and messages will resonate with the clinical study audiences we are reaching out to, so that when a campaign goes live, there are no surprises. We can predict how the messages will be received because they are based on and have been tested with appropriate audiences.

The research helps us illuminate unproductive calls to our contact center by facilitating high patient eligibility rates (the number of patients eligible divided by the number who respond to the messages). In other words, comprehensive formative research leads to fewer calls from ineligible patients – the messages are so clear that only those patients compliant with the specifics of the protocol (inclusion and exclusion criteria) are likely to make an inquiry call. Research saves sponsors time and money and leads to quicker recruitment of study participants, otherwise not as efficient.

NGP. Do you see new media such as the Internet as the future, or will traditional platforms remain the core of your work?

Traditional platforms will certainly still play a role, but without question new media and the Internet specifically are the future.

With increasing technological innovation, the “wired world” is here and already a cornerstone of the services and strategies that we provide in support of clinical trial recruitment and retention. The Internet is an unavoidable, cost-effective, data rich environment, with limitless potential and efficiencies. About 70 percent of our campaigns include a new media or Internet component, both as a strategy and as a communication and reporting tool among the study sponsor, study sites, MMG, and other consultants and vendors who need to track progress.

MMG has patient recruitment and retention experience and expertise across the full spectrum of healthcare areas and within special populations. Its strategic campaigns, tactics and materials are research-based and health behavior focused, ensuring that efficient and effective messages reach the right audience and facilitate required patient enrollment and evaluable clinical data.

MMG is uniquely qualified:

• Its strategies and tactics are developed and based on the unique requirements and goals of each clinical study.
• Its staff is committed to the advancement of medicine, health education and awareness toward better and healthier living for all people.
• It has expertise in developing campaigns that reach special populations distinguished by age (pediatric (parents), adolescent, geriatric), gender, ethnicity, race, geography, etc.
• Its full-service in-house capabilities include research, creative, advertising, media relations, contact center, and new media services.

Founded in 1987 with contracts from the National Cancer Institute (USA), MMG is a clinical research patient recruitment and retention firm educating and attracting diverse patient populations – in sufficient numbers and within designated timelines – to accelerate clinical study enrollment.

John Benbrook is the president of MMG, headquartered in Rockville, Maryland, USA. He has led client relationship and service delivery for communications technology companies serving the pharmaceutical and life science industries for 20 years. As the firm’s new president, he is distinguishing MMG’s service both with innovative approaches and exceptional client service, pro-active, flexible delivery.