How Do Sponsors Get Clearer Visibility Into the Enrollment Funnel?

A sponsor looking at a monthly recruitment report usually sees two numbers that matter: leads generated and patients randomized. Everything decisive happens between them, and that space is typically dark.

When enrollment is behind, that darkness is expensive. You cannot tell whether you have a media problem, a screening problem, a site responsiveness problem, or a protocol problem, so you buy more media because it is the only lever you can see.

Referrals generated Referrals contacted, and time to first contact Pre-screening completed Pre-screen qualified Visits scheduled Visits attended Screened at site Randomized

Eight numbers. With them, diagnosis takes ten minutes. Without them, it takes a month of meetings.

Referrals high, contact low: a staffing or process failure, not a media failure. More ads will make it worse. Contact high, qualification low: targeting is off, or the criteria are narrower than the campaign assumes. Qualified high, scheduled low: appointment availability or handoff friction at the site. Scheduled high, attended low: lead times too long, or no reminder process. Attended high, randomized low: pre-screening is not deep enough, or the protocol is excluding more people than modeled.

Each diagnosis has a different fix and a different cost. Guessing usually picks the most expensive one.

Write it into the contract Specify the funnel stages, the granularity, and the cadence before signing. Vendors who track this operationally will agree quickly. Vendors who do not track it will negotiate the requirement down, which answers the question.

Insist on site-level detail Aggregates hide the two sites carrying the study and the six that have not contacted a referral in a month. Remediation only works at the site level.

Reconcile against the site's own numbers Quarterly, compare vendor-reported scheduled visits against what the sites recorded. Gaps between the two are common and usually reveal a handoff breaking somewhere.

Monthly reporting tells you what happened. Weekly reporting lets you fix it while it is happening. For a study behind curve, weekly funnel review with named owners for each underperforming site is the difference between recovering the timeline and explaining the miss.

We report at this level by default because we operate the middle of the funnel ourselves. If you want a look at where your current program is losing people, request a proposal or reach out to our team .