All Times EDT
Keywords: COVID-19, clinical trial recruitment, Poisson process
The COVID-19 pandemic presented unique challenges for clinical trial recruitment, not least because of government-imposed lockdown measures restricting peoples’ movements and hence their ability to attend clinic. To assess the impact on ongoing trials, GSK’s approach was to rapidly assemble a task-force to: collate all appropriate data sources; identify a model that could provide revised predictions of recruitment targets (with appropriate uncertainty) that were adjusted for various projected COVID-19 scenarios; and produce an app for communicating these predictions to study teams. In this talk I will discuss development of the model, which attempts to explain the ‘gap’ between actual, time-varying recruitment rates during the early pandemic and the rates used to construct the original study-plan as a function of the COVID-19 lockdown measures in different countries. I will also discuss how we worked closely with study teams to identify which information was most valuable to them, and how best to convey this.