Running Recruitment for Six Studies Without Shortchanging Any

Most sites don't fail at recruitment because one study is hard. They fail because six studies are competing for the same phone line, the same coordinator hour, and often the same patient. Running concurrent recruitment well is less about effort and more about deliberate allocation.

Map overlap before you accept the study

The single highest-leverage moment is feasibility. Before signing, lay your active and pending protocols side by side and answer three questions:

• Do inclusion criteria overlap? Two type 2 diabetes studies with similar A1c windows will cannibalize each other. One will underenroll, and it is usually the one that started second.
• Do they draw from the same referral source? If both depend on the same cardiology group, your pipeline is thinner than it looks on paper.
• Do screening visits compete for the same resource? One ECG machine, one centrifuge, one PI signature window.

If overlap is unavoidable, decide the triage rule in advance. Common approaches: assign by narrowest eligibility first (the study that can accept fewer people gets first look), by enrollment deadline, or by how far behind target each study is. What matters is that the rule exists in writing so a coordinator at 4pm on a Friday isn't inventing it.

Give every study a named owner and a weekly number

Shared ownership of recruitment produces diffuse accountability. Each active study should have one coordinator whose name is attached to its enrollment number, even if the work is executed by a team. That person reports a single figure weekly: randomizations needed per week to hit target, versus actual.

That ratio is your triage dashboard. A study needing 1.2 enrollments per week and getting 1.3 does not need attention. A study needing 2 and getting 0.4 needs either new sourcing or a sponsor conversation — and it needs it this month, not in the last quarter of the enrollment window.

Protect dedicated recruitment time

In most site datasets, outreach collapses first when visit volume spikes. Coordinators prioritize the participant in the chair, correctly. The fix is structural: block recruitment time on the calendar as if it were a monitoring visit, and keep it off the schedule for walk-ins. Two hours of protected calling, done reliably, outperforms six hours of scattered attempts between visits.

Some sites separate the roles entirely — one person who pre-screens and schedules across all studies, and coordinators who handle visits. This works well once you're running more than four or five concurrent protocols, because the pre-screener develops real fluency across criteria and can redirect a caller to a better-fitting study instead of a flat no.

Build one intake path, many destinations

Avoid study-specific phone numbers, inboxes, and landing pages for every protocol. One intake funnel with a short universal front end — condition, age, medications, location — lets you route a candidate to whichever open study fits. This also means a no for one protocol becomes a maybe for another instead of a lost contact.

Keep a tagged database of people who screened out for reasons that may change: washout periods ending, lab values near a threshold, a condition that excludes them today. Concurrent recruiting makes this list far more valuable, because the odds that something opens up for them are much higher.

Review the portfolio, not the study

Hold a short weekly portfolio meeting. Go study by study, state the weekly gap, and name one action. Then make the hard call: which study gets extra outreach dollars and hours this week, and which coasts. Deciding that explicitly beats letting whichever sponsor emailed most recently set your priorities.