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

Calling a potential participant once or twice without a structured or scheduled approach will likely result in a very low contact success rate. Our recommended approach is for our clients to utilize our phone screen appointment booking 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 the patient referrals.

Failing this, 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 referral 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/.