One Lead, Five Open Studies: Routing Without the Turf War
When a site runs concurrent studies, every new lead raises a question: which study gets them? Ad-hoc answers cost enrollments and morale.
By Trialflow Team
A single-study site never asks whom a lead belongs to. A site running five concurrent protocols asks constantly — and if the answer depends on which coordinator saw the inquiry first, both enrollment and team cohesion suffer.
The failure modes of ad-hoc routing
Left unmanaged, multi-study routing produces predictable pathologies: leads parked in the study whose coordinator grabbed them rather than the best fit; candidates eligible for nothing today but perfect for next month's study getting discarded; and coordinators competing for the same registry contacts with duplicate calls.
Principles for a routing policy
Match to the person's best fit, not the site's neediest study. Tempting as it is to shunt everyone toward the study that's furthest behind, forcing marginal fits inflates screen-fails and burns candidates who might have enrolled cleanly elsewhere. Eligibility strength first; enrollment urgency as the tiebreaker between genuine fits.
Screen once, match many. The intake conversation should collect enough to evaluate against all open protocols — not just the one that prompted the call. A structured intake profile matched against every study's criteria turns one inquiry into multiple chances.
Define the tiebreakers in writing. When someone fits two studies: urgency of enrollment timelines, screening slot availability, visit burden versus the person's constraints, and — worth stating — the participant's own preference after hearing both options plainly.
Preserve the near-misses. "Not eligible for anything open" is a registry entry with structured exclusion reasons, not a dead end.
Governance that keeps it fair
A weekly cross-study huddle — fifteen minutes, all recruiting coordinators, the shared pipeline on screen — resolves contested cases and reallocates stalled leads. When routing rules are explicit and the pipeline is visible to everyone, the turf war dissolves into logistics. The site enrolls more, and nobody's Monday starts with an argument.
Enrolling studies shouldn't be this hard
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