Is social media suitable for patient recruitment

The use of social media is tremendously increasing since years and will continue its growth. Recent examples show that social media can also be used to attract patients to clinical trials and improve recruitment rates. In addition, retention of the patient is increased. Social media help in designing clinical trials by obtaining early feedback from possible patients, informing patients about clinical trials and facilitating their participation by providing tools to guide them through the trial. To achieve this, social media use three different channels, listen – inform – engage. For listening and feedback, blogs can best be used, for information purposes social networking sites. To engage patients, apps are very useful.