Clincierge, a Philadelphia-based provider of specialized services and personalized support designed to overcome barriers to patient participation in clinical studies, expanded its patient concierge service into Cyprus. This is the 30th country where the company’s high-touch, one-on-one services for patients and families are available to aid companies conducting clinical trials increase trial enrollment and improve patient retention, thus helping to ensure that costly studies complete on time and on budget.

“Since its inception two years ago, Clincierge has supported multiple studies internationally for pharmaceutical companies and CROs with great success and overwhelming positive feedback from patients,  research site personnel and sponsors,” said Scott Gray, Clincierge chief executive officer. “By offering patients and their families personalized services in their own language from their own in-country coordinator, and providing patients ease-of-access to research sites, studies using Clincierge have seen increased enrollment and have maintained drop-out rates of less than 5%. Moreover, the cost of incorporating Clincierge services has averaged less than 1% to overall clinical trial costs.”

Offering personalized support to trial participants and their families alleviates anxieties about trial-related travel, expenses and other issues that can get in the way of patients enrolling and staying in a clinical study.

“The ultimate goal of Clincierge is to aid drug developers in reducing overall clinical testing time and cost by making clinical trials more patient-centric, thus helping ensure that new treatments get to the market and to patients who need them as swiftly as possible,” said Gray.

The company’s services—including individualized travel and housing logistics, rapid user-friendly payment/reimbursement systems, and ongoing personalized, in-country patient and caregiver support—are designed to reduce the anxiety and out-of-pocket expenses faced by trial participants and their families. From the time a patient enrolls in a Clincierge-supported study until study completion, the company’s multilingual, in-country Clincierges provide support by coordinating, managing and communicating with patients and their families and caregivers each step of the way. Clincierge addresses special patient needs and complex trial designs by building custom solutions to specific study-related problems.

The company currently supports trials in 30 countries and 23 languages, adding new service areas and capabilities as its clients need them.

Clincierge also helps trial sponsors, CROs and research institutions manage cost and time through a proprietary business management platform. Not only designed to increase patient participation and retention in clinical studies, the Clincierge platform allows for transparent, customizable financial reporting and analysis. Trial site and sponsor staff are similarly benefited by Clincierge’s services, which can help to relieve clinical research associates, investigators, study managers and other site personnel from time-consuming patient logistics—thus, enabling them to focus on patient care, study administration and data management.