For site leaders, sponsors, and CROs
By Kyle Fogarty, CEO & Founder, Polus Health
An enrollment plan is also a plan for someone’s time.
Every candidate entering a study’s workflow creates work: records to review, questions to resolve, information to explain, and next steps to coordinate. When we discuss enrollment targets, I believe we should give that work the same attention we give patient volume.
My view is that an enrollment target is incomplete until we explain how the site team will have the capacity to deliver it. Coordinator time deserves a place in feasibility discussions, budgets, and decisions about adding studies.
Consider a hypothetical retina site preparing for a study. A growing candidate list looks encouraging, but the team still needs to connect medical records, available retinal images, and protocol-specific criteria. If the same information is reviewed repeatedly or missing details remain unresolved until late in the process, that longer list can consume capacity without producing comparable enrollment progress.
Before asking that site to increase activity, I would want to understand what its existing activity requires.
Which questions could be answered earlier? Which records are incomplete? Where does a coordinator have to repeat an assessment because the original handoff did not explain its reasoning?
Those questions make the workload visible. They also give leaders something specific to improve.
Polus Health was built by people with experience inside clinical research sites. That background informs our focus on AI-assisted prescreening, clinical expertise, and workflows designed around the teams doing the work. Learn about Polus Health’s approach.
For me, the leadership implication is broader than any single platform.
When evaluating an enrollment initiative, I would ask teams to measure the work required to move a candidate forward. Track time spent resolving missing information. Look at repeated reviews. Ask coordinators which parts of the process consistently prevent them from focusing on patients.
Then give those findings a place in the next planning conversation. Before asking a site to take on another study, ask which work can be completed earlier, who will own it, and how the change will be assessed. Technology earns its place when it helps the team make a better-informed decision with less repetition.
A process improvement should make the next decision clearer. A referral should arrive with enough context to support a useful next step. A new tool should earn its place by helping the people who use it.
We should also be careful about how we spend any capacity we recover. Some of that time may support additional enrollment. Some may be needed for patient conversations, follow-up, and the demands of an existing study.
The goal is a workflow a team can sustain while doing careful research.
If you lead a site or study, start with one question at your next enrollment meeting: Where are we spending coordinator time that better preparation could protect?