Meet SCRS Global Impact Partner: Accelerate Recruitment Services

Carlos Bussey, CEO of Accelerate Recruitment Services, dives deep into the groundbreaking innovations his company is bringing to the table and their role in the SCRS Global Impact Partner program. Hear the journey of this forward-thinking organization working to support clinical research sites and revolutionize patient recruitment.

Transcript

Jimmy Bechtel: 0:01

Welcome and thank you for joining the Society for Clinical Research Sites for SCRS Talks. I'm Jimmy Bechtel, the Vice President of Site Engagement with the Society. SCRS Talks allows our partners and those that we work closely with to take a few minutes to address issues of industry concern, share exciting achievements, and to learn more about our community. Today, we have Carlos Bussey, the Chief Executive Officer of Accelerate Recruitment Services, here to share with us they're exciting advancements and talk about their joining the global impact partnership program with SCRS. Carlos, it's great to have you with us. It's great to have accelerate recruitment services as one of our newest GIPs and to start things off. I'd love to hear a little bit about you and a little bit about accelerate recruitment services.

Carlos Bussey: 0:51

Absolutely. Well, it's nice to be here with you, Jimmy. You know, a big fan of SCRS. That's why we joined. And we have been around for about three years. We've been developing a TrueViewer portal before we actually launched and went live with clinical trials as the central recruitment vendor. But I've been in research since 2006. And that's where actually when I. I started at the same time as my business partner, Alexandra Rowden, and we started at an SMO. I was doing business development and contracting, and my background is I actually am originally from South America. I was born in Uruguay, raised in Argentina, and I went to law school, and then I came to the States, and that kind of happened into clinical research like a lot of us. Now Accelerate Recruitment came out of a need so we were at the SMO level and in 2020, with a pandemic patients weren't going to the clinics anymore, so we had to get a little bit creative. Normally, our business model for the SMO was we would partner with busy practices and leverage the patient database and getting patients directly from the clinic. Now, as patients stopped coming to the clinics, we realized that we had to start doing some social media advertising. So we started looking into a lot of different vendors and mind you I've been in the space since 2006. So we've worked with pretty much all of the companies that are out there. Now we found that there were issues with what we wanted to do. We weren't getting enough patients. So we asked the sponsors if they could give us the budgets that they were spending on central recruitment campaigns directly to us, and we started doing our own social media campaigns. And we realized pretty quickly that this was working better than using different vendors. So much so actually that we had a big sponsor ask us for about a year to become the central recruitment vendor, because they were seeing a three to one return on investment with our recruitment as opposed to the big time companies that are out there. So after a year of us saying no, because just we didn't want to take that on. We're pretty busy as a site. We ended up agreeing to do so, and we closed a study that had been open for five years in 90 days, and that's really when we realized, Okay, we are onto something here. So that's kind of our origin story for accelerate recruitment services.

Jimmy Bechtel: 3:22

That's great, Carlos. It's really, really interesting to hear always how some of our partners get started and where they had and where they've come from to be able to do some of that. And that logical transition from being this site really With a need and honing in on that need and refreshing it and bringing it up to a new place is really interesting. Is there any other additional information, kind of an overview of where you are now, really with what accelerate risk recruitment services does and hone in on your specific role in the research industry and the service that you might provide. I think we can draw conclusions from your introduction there, but maybe focusing in on some of kind of where we are now.

Carlos Bussey: 4:05

Of course, so we spent a long time creating TrueView, which really is what sets us apart, right? Because It's easy to generate the qualified referrals. Now the hard part is converting these referrals into randomized subjects in your clinical trial. So we used all of the experience that we've had and at the site level trying to convert these patients into subjects that are randomizing completed in the studies. So true view is really, we created our own custom CRM in which you're going to be able to manage the patient participation throughout the whole study. For example, you're going to run your ads on social media. The patients are going to be interested in your clinical trial. They're going to click on the ad to go to the landing page. From here they're going to answer the pre qualifying form, basic inclusion exclusion criteria. And then if they're eligible, that information is going to go to our portal, which we call true view. Now they're, site users are going to be able to log in and see the qualified referrals and access the qualified referral information, and they can call the patients directly from the system. You're they're also going to be able to see the answers to the pre qualifying form to confirm eligibility and then, you know, Obviously, the first time you're getting a cold call from somebody, you're going to decline the call. Now, as soon as you mark a left voicemail in the system, the system's automatically going to trigger a text message and email to that participant, letting them know that you're reaching out from, The site and you're calling about the study how much they're going to be compensated if they're eligible to participate and complete the trial. And this is going to remove some of those manual tasks that the coordinators or recruiters have to do, right? Which is Text and email the patients as soon as you leave a voicemail. So we are trying to do part of the work for the sites. That way you're running a more efficient recruitment campaign. Now, the same automation features are going to happen when you're scheduling the patient. They're going to get an automatic appointment, confirmation, email, and SMS. And. And they're going to get a reminder at 6 p. m. the day before their appointments, so they can easily reach out if they need to cancel or reschedule. Now we also have retention features in which these automation tools are available. You can schedule the follow up visits. And one of the things that our sites love is the automated reminders. For example, if you have patients in a clinical trial that have to complete their EPROS at a certain time every day, you can trigger these every day and it's all automated and we send a link to where they need to log in to complete those questionnaires. Now the other updates that we're doing. So we're integrating with, Lyft, so we're going to be able to actually schedule the patient rides directly from the system when you schedule an appointment and our next integration as soon as we're that we're actually in beta testing will be patient stipend payments. You are going to be able to pay the patients for the visits directly from the system with Zelle PayPal, or we can give them a manual card that is going to be replenished every time they complete a visit. So we're trying to look at every solution that we can think of, we're clearly now going to keep adding to our system as we are now a tech company. So, we're always going to be implementing new things, whatever we hear from the sites that they could use, we're going to work towards getting that done.

Jimmy Bechtel: 7:30

Wow, Carlos, I think there's a lot of really interesting aspects of that platform. I think the emphasis on qualified referrals, I think is really important. And there's an interesting perspective that I think you bring to that as an SMO manager, then we'll say victim of other recruitment tools and organizations that we all know bring a lot of unqualified referrals. So I think that perspective, having come from a site and understanding the importance of getting qualified referrals, I think is really interesting. The other aspect that I think is really interesting about this platform is that it's this end to end CRM. We have a lot of CTMS capabilities in the industry. We all know the different players in that space, but there really isn't a lot of true CRM functionality in any of the platforms that we use. And what I mean by that is, like you have described it, that end to end qualified referral all the way through their trial journey and their pre trial journey, I think, is a really interesting and unique take on patient recruitment. So a couple of kind of key takeaways that I heard from your explanation there, and I think it's revolutionizing the way that we do some of our patient recruitment.

Carlos Bussey: 8:45

That is definitely our goal. Now we are also in talks to integrate with the big players in the CTMS space as well, because again, coming from the site background we know that every clinical trial has, you know, 10 to 20 vendors that you have different logins. So we're giving the options to sites, or at least we want to give the options that, Hey, you can use our system. Or we can send the patients directly to your CTMS. Now, the other thing that we're doing, if the sites engage us directly, and they're the client, we will also share with the sites, the referrals that did not qualify so that they can add to their database. So long as the patients agree for us to share that information with the site to be contacted for future studies, and we'll leave that up to the sites. However, Another thing that differentiates us is we recruit patients for this particular study. We don't retarget. So all these referrals that we're generating are interested in this specific study for this specific site, right? We're not basically just accruing all this information. Then, if you ever signed up for a clinical trial, you're going to get a text message and email about every future trial. We've worked with companies that do that. It doesn't work for us. You're asking sites to contact patients that are most likely not going to be eligible. So, we don't do that. We cut that off. So everybody is a fresh lead.

Jimmy Bechtel: 10:06

That's excellent. Even more compounding factors as to why I think this is a really, really interesting solution. And I think sites are going to be interested to learn more about this as well. So Carlos, can you share a little bit about why you then became global impact partners? And how does this partnership really align with your mission and values as an organization?

Carlos Bussey: 10:26

For sure. So. I've been again doing research for quite a few years, and I've been going to a lot of different conferences and the SCRS conference was the first time. And actually, as soon as I started the conference, I called up my business partner, Alex, and told her, like, this is the one that we need to come every year. It's to me the most, as far as a site per sites, the most helpful conference. And resources that are actually helping to bring forward sites that are struggling with certain areas. So it also ties into, once somebody asked me why I'm in clinical research, if I liked what I did and my answer after thinking about it was, I'm fortunate enough to be in a space that we're actually helping people. And if we can be profitable while we're helping people and have a business around it, then we're blessed to be able to do what we do. Now SCRS, the way I see it on this global impact partnership is we're doing the same thing for sites. So since we started accelerate recruitment, we now can bring patients to any site anywhere in the United States for any indication. I mean, we know, cause we do it for ourselves and 95 percent of every patient that we enroll in a study is coming from advertising. So we're trying to let sites know about this, and I think that SCRS and the Global Impact Partnership program is a great tool for us to spread the word and help each other out.

Jimmy Bechtel: 11:54

I couldn't agree more, Carlos. Those are some extremely valid reasons for the program and we're excited to have you because, anytime there's some sort of revolutionary new take on a solution, a technology solution for the industry, we want to make sure the sites know about it. So we're again, excited to be able to provide you a platform to get this in front of our industry partners and in front of sites. So looking forward to what this brings next for us. And the last question that I have for you, Carlos, before we start to conclude our conversation here is what advice might you have then for sites who are interested in working for you. And how can they learn more about your services, beyond attendance at our global and other site solutions summits.

Carlos Bussey: 12:38

So the advice is just reach out. You can go to our website, accelrecruitment. com and you can schedule a demo call with us. We can walk you through what we can do for you. And our plans are actually really accessible for sites. It's a 1000 set up fee for the campaign and 1000 a month. And we only bill you for when we're running ads. If you're not happy, we can turn off the ads and we will only bill you for what we ran. And 75 percent of everything that we bill is going directly into ad spend. So just give us a try. You're going to be surprised at how many patients you can get.

Jimmy Bechtel: 13:15

And that sounds like a business model built by sites built for sites, Carlos. I can't emphasize enough how important it is. I think that your and your partner's perspective coming from the SMO from the site space, having walked the walk and experienced many of the challenges, as you mentioned earlier, with recruitment that shine in the way that you approach this business and the technology development itself. So thank you for being with us here today. Thank you for joining the global impact partnership. I'm excited to see what the future brings for your organization and for this technology and how it can help the sites. And thank you again for being here with us today and sharing a little bit more about Accelerate Recruitment Services.

Carlos Bussey: 13:58

Of course. Thank you for your time. It's been a pleasure.

Jimmy Bechtel: 14:00

For those that are listening, make sure that you register for upcoming summits being held throughout the year by visiting our summit page, on our website, my SCRS. org. While you're on our website, be sure to check out other SCRS publications built for our community in the publications section of that same website. Be sure to also check out accelerate recruitment services at upcoming summits as well as at their website as Carlos mentioned. We appreciate your participation in listening to today's program and look forward to having you join us for more great content coming up very soon. Thanks again for listening.