Fastest Way to Calculate ARRs (Accurately)

How many patients per site per month can you expect to recruit? 

This is the million (sometimes literally) dollar question. It determines how many sites you open and how long your trial runs. Of course, you also want to check competition - how many other trials your sites are working on, and patients around the site. 

Then, you want to consider the patient pathway and why patients would choose your trial, etc. 

But first things first, you want to see how trials similar to yours performed in the past. 

How far in the past though? 

The recruitment landscape 10 years ago was different. If you look at trials in the past 10 years, the data may mislead you. You want to look at trials in the past 3-5 years so the landscape is as close to the current one as possible. 

Then there is the question of what is the purpose of the trial?

Observational trials are likely to recruit more patients and to do it faster than interventional ones. You need to look at trials similar in purpose to yours - if you’re doing device feasibility, look at trials testing devices. 

Are there other trials with your protocol?

Sometimes you’re working on a protocol with very specific requirements. Are there trials completed in the last 3 years whose eligibility criteria is similar to yours? Maybe your eligibility criteria narrow down the patient pool and so trials with a similar protocol had a lower ARR than trials accepting a wider patient population. You need to check for that as well. 

By the way, TrialHub has a new filter you can use to easily check out trials with your protocol requirements. 

Lastly, you need to make sure to exclude outliers. 

Sometimes trials have high ARRs because the same patients who were recruited in the previous phase automatically took part in this one as well. You can easily notice outliers when you compare trials relevant to your protocol.

Pro tip: TrialHub allows you to exclude them in the filters - just copy their NCT number and paste it into the exclusion field.

Doing all of the above manually for a single trial in a single country is daunting. Doing it for more than one trial and in multiple countries on a deadline is 🤯 . But you don’t have to do that. 

TrialHub shows you the ARR of trials in your indication, your countries of interest with protocols similar to yours so you know exactly what to expect.