With a new and strong focus on supporting patient engagement activities through patient recruitment service, James Lind Care has helped several pharmaceutical companies and CROs to connect with thousands of patients for projects within the first four months of 2025.
At the beginning of 2025, James Lind Care announced a new and additional focus on patient engagement projects to contribute to our already existing patient recruitment service for clinical trials.
This focus was to help recruit patients for patient engagement activities such as recruiting specific patient groups for online surveys, induvial patients for focus groups or other type of activities related to patient engagement.
James Lind Care’s Patient Engagement Director, Rasmus Hjorth, made it his mission to partner with CROs and pharmaceutical companies to identify and collaborate on projects where they were struggling to connect with the right patients.
“I have seen how much willingness and interest that exist among both pharmaceutical companies and patients to connect and engage with each other to ultimately improve drug development. They often just don’t know how to, and I think we at James Lind Care is a solution to this problem, being the bridging needed.”
Recruited 3,500 COPD patients for online survey
One of the first projects James Lind Care has been able to help was a top 20 global pharmaceutical company running a survey for COPD patients. They were specifically looking to boost the number of respondents for an online survey.
Before James Lind Care initiated their patient recruitment activities for this project, the number of respondents was around 1,000. After James Lind Care reached out to their patient community to activate and engage the members with COPD within the Scandinavian countries, which was the specific patient group that the sponsor was looking for, the number rapidly grew to 4,500 respondents.
With an acceleration of 3,500 extra respondents within a time period of just one week, the pharmaceutical company was blown away. This helped them save money for advertising for the survey, improved the survey results, and cut the timelines of the project.
One of the main reasons why James Lind Care can accelerate patient engagement projects is its digital patient communities. With more than 300.000 very engaged members who all signed up to engage and be a part of drug development and projects that aims to improve the lives of patients.
Three rare disease patients engaged via community approach
Another case example of how successful James Lind Care’s approach to patient engagement project can be, is the project where the recruitment service was being requested for a patient engagement project that was looking for rare disease patients.
The CRO was looking for three patients within a specific European country to do online interviews. They had been struggling to find this patient group due to specific criteria of the population combined with a very high rarity of the disease.
This was also the conclusion when looking of the representation of the patient population within James Lind Care’s own patient community.
But one of the other upsides of James Lind Care’s approach is that they have national teams in each country they operate in, and also establish collaboration with local patient organisations and communities.
One of these partnerships quickly proved to be the solution for this project. The local employee responsible for the operation in the country the project was looking for participants, reached out to this patient community representing the exact patient group needed for this project. Within 24 hours, James Lind Care could post about the project and managed to recruit 26 patients fulfilling the criteria for the project.
“We ultimately managed to exceed the expectation from the CRO, and we were happy to experience their excitement for our service in terms of the quality and speed with which we delivered the recruitment service. This has ultimately resulted in the CRO requesting our service for more projects, which we are very happy about,” says Patient Engagement Director, Rasmus Hjorth. He adds: “But what makes me even more happy is the triple win we can create with these types of projects.
“Obviously, we create a win for the CRO or pharmaceutical company we are recruiting for by boosting and accelerating their activities. We also generate a win for the patients as they are being invited to empower their voices in the pharmaceutical industry. Thirdly, we also contribute to generating more knowledge about the lives of patients that can be used to benefit and improve patients’ lives all together.”
With two successful patient engagement projects already carried out, James Lind Care is just getting started and are looking to grow their patient recruitment service within this field even more.