Custom CRM Database to Recruit and Retain Patients for Clinical Trials

To successfully perform a clinical trial, pharmaceutical companies need a specific number of patients for it. The insufficient number of patients often results in the termination of a trial. 86% of all U.S. clinical studies fail to recruit the required number of subjects on time, provoking huge financial losses.

Accordingly, it's very critical to efficiently manage all stages of patient recruitment and retention.

However, often, there is no centralized patient database with easy access and management for all the sides involved in the patient recruitment workflow: a pharmaceutical company, patient recruitment company, and clinical trials research company

To solve the challenge, the Client decides to create a custom CRM database with three roles access.

However, as a startup, they have no in-house team to develop custom software from scratch. They need to find a reliable partner who can hire top talent for the project and understand their specific requirements.

Belitsoft's development team has built a custom CRM with high flexibility and scalability that can be customized on demand.

The web app is developed and hosted in the cloud, in Amazon Web Service.

The CRM database has become a single entrance point, where pharmaceutical companies can find patients and get advanced analytics and reporting.

How CRM fosters patient recruitment

1. Initial Patient Recruitment

Our Client, as a patient recruitment agency, generates potential patients into a CRM database. They use Google Ads, banners on medical websites, Facebook, and Instagram.

The ads attract users to visit a landing page devoted to a clinical trial and fill in an online form.

The data gathered about a patient automatically goes to the CRM.

2. Qualifying and Communicating with Patients

A clinical trials research center, responsible for the study, gets a preliminary list of patients.

Representatives of research centers (research assistants) get in touch with patients using text messages and emails directly through the CRM.

After contacting a patient to qualify them, the research assistant changes their statuses in the CRM from New to Contacted, Excluded, Screened, or other.

For further contact or visit scheduling, the research assistant uses the Calendar to enter the data and then get notified about it.

In addition, research assistants need to notify and remind patients about a visit. They can do this directly through the CRM. Sending SMS is performed with the help of API integration of Twilio communication tools. Emails can be sent thanks to Google Workspace REST API integration with the CRM.

The software also automates messages with patients based on events such as left voicemail or confirming an initial visit. It helps increase patient conversion rates.

3. Reporting to pharmaceutical companies

The CRM reporting dashboard collects the most essential data about the patient recruitment and retention process, such as:

• the number of patients per study or per research center,
• the patient conversion rate,
• the average number of contacts with a patient, and many more KPIs.

The tracked KPIs may be changed or added on demand. The report can be downloaded in one click.

Tech Stack

• Back-end: PHP, Laravel
• Front-end: ReactJS
• OS: Linux
• Database: MySQL

The Client's requirement was to use a popular and up-to-date technical stack. Such a combination was suggested as an optimal one in terms of development cost and time.

As another essential advantage, Belitsoft had a ready-to-start experienced Laravel development team that could be immediately involved in the custom CRM development.

Fast and On-Budget Delivery Based on Kanban and Scrum

The Client came to Belitsoft with detailed requirements for the project, and the development team knew a full project scope. That's why, we agreed to follow Kanban and a fixed price model for our cooperation. Applying Kanban let us put clear deadlines for every milestone and arrange regular and timely deliveries. In case the Client wanted to change or add new deliverables, we applied Change Requests (formal proposals to alter a product).

To set up effective and clear communication with the Client, we used 2-week sprints and regular meetings as a part of the Scrum methodology.

The Belitsoft's development team delivered results every 2 weeks and received corresponding feedback. Additionally, we were in contact with the Client on a regular basis – after each update, for discussing change requests, and in other cases on demand.

The CRM Development Process

Step 1. Discovery phase

The Client came with a clearly defined idea. Our task at that stage was to bridge the concept of the product with its technical realization, optimizing and fitting the development costs into the budget.

For that, Belitsoft's business analyst and business development specialist performed a thorough business analysis. The outcome of this work was a detailed step-by-step development strategy that covered both business and technical aspects, for example, market research, tech stack, development stages, the product features, and many more product details.

In the result of the discovery phase, the Client received a clear, technically backed vision and scope of the project together with a cost estimation.

Step 2. MVP development

The suggested development plan and cost met the demands and expectations of the Client, so the development phase started in short.

The development team used a ready-made design solution, adapting it to brand colors and website styles. The goal was to create intuitive, easy-to-use design with simple user journey at the minimal cost.

The MVP development was performed in time and on budget. It helped the Client demonstrate the solution to potential sponsors and gain sponsorship as expected. The release was planned in spring 2022.

Step 3. CRM Version 2.0 development

After MVP launching in early 2022, further development has started.

The major difference now has been the absence of the clearly defined project scope for the new development phase. That's why, the cooperation model has changed to Time and Material with the aim to give more freedom and flexibility in adding or changing the feature set during further development.

The features to be added include, for example, a new user role on the sponsor's demand.

Step 4. Quality Assurance

Belitsoft's team performed manual software testing throughout the entire development process.

Manual testing is a go-to option in this project because it's relatively small for automation. Besides, from the end-user perspective, a manual QA engineer can ensure that the software looks and feels exactly as expected.

Development Team

• 1 backend developer;
• 1 frontend developer;
• 1 QA engineer (part-time)
• 1 business analyst; (part-time)
• 1 project manager (part-time).

The brand-new CRM startup got released in April 2022 as the Client expected and received the first paying customer, a pharmaceutical company.

The software has got a convenient and simple-to-use interface and full visibility of patients' recruitment KPIs, which is highly evaluated by customers of our Client. It can be easily customized and scaled on demand.

As Belitsoft has managed to satisfy the Client's requirement, our companies keep on working on further optimization of the software to meet such business goals as:

• expanding services across all the United States;
• increasing revenue by enlarging a patients' database;
• building a trustworthy reputation in the industry by attracting and providing great services to pharmaceutical companies and research sites.