How Many times Do We Need to Try to Contact Referrals?

Without a structured or scheduled approach, calling a potential participant just once or twice will likely lead to a very low contact success rate.

Our recommended approach is for our clients to utilize our phone screen appointment system and strictly adhere to appointments set by referrals when conducting phone screenings. This not only simplifies the process but also significantly improves the success rate of contacting patient referrals.

If you choose not to use our phone screen appointment system, some additional phone screening best practices include:

• Call immediately when the patient signs up - within 5 minutes or as soon as possible. The chance of reaching a referral exponentially declines the more time elapses from their first show of interest to participate in a study or trial.
• Where possible, we advise following up with referrals as many as 10 times, while our referrals spreadsheet indicates referrals are "Unreachable After 5 Attempts", we suggest continued persistence. There are many reasons a referral could be unreachable, and it's important to pursue this potentially valuable resource with as much effort and tenacity as is within your capacity.
• Attempt contact at a variety of times and days, including after hours and weekends, where possible. The referral spreadsheet also contains information on each referral's "Best Time to Contact" which may prove useful in this regard.

• Use different methods of contact if one proves ineffective (phone, email, text message).

  
  

In this article, we outline best practices for contacting patients: http://trialfacts.com/articles/phone-screening/.