According to research conducted by Elligo Health Research, there are four reasons why travel services are essential for clinical trial recruitment, execution, and more. After all, you want your trial to be as easy as possible for participants, but travel support has great importance beyond altruism:

1. It’s Expected… Research sites and participants expect travel support. Such services have become so ubiquitous in modern clinical trials that not offering them is a major red flag that could negatively impact interested sites and patient enrollment.
2. Patient Enrollment… 80% of clinical trials have a hard time finding patients at all — much less patients who live so close to sites that they won’t need to travel. Patient travel services ease common clinical trial enrollment challenges because they make trials more accessible and more attractive to potential participants.
3. Patient Retention… Clinical trials have an average patient dropout rate of about 30%, leading to increased costs, delays, and other execution issues. Since travel services make it easy for patients to participate in trials, they also help reduce dropout rates.
4. Site Selection… Without patient travel services, helping participants get to and from study visits becomes the sites’ job — and sites already have enough to do without also having to handle participant transportation! When you add on the burden of travel support, sites will be less likely to participate in your trial, and the sites that do participate in your trial will have trouble balancing administrative work with protocol execution, impacting overall data quality. Between easing enrollment, increasing retention, and reducing site burden, travel services make clinical research faster, cheaper, and more effective.