How a Well-Intentioned Enrollment Fix Made the Underlying Problem Worse

Adding sites is the fastest lever when enrollment stalls. Here is why it fails, and what to run first.

When enrollment falls behind, expanding the network of clinical research sites is the lever sponsors can pull fastest. Site counts are visible, contractable, and reportable to leadership. The reflex makes sense.

The real question is whether the market holds enough patients who can qualify, and most site plans assume the answer instead of testing it.

Screening Capacity Is Not Recruitment Potential

Two numbers decide an enrollment timeline, and they are not the same:

• Screening capacity: how many patients your sites can process.
• Recruitment potential: how many patients in the market can qualify and want to take part.

A site plan can be rich in capacity and poor in potential, and the enrollment dashboard never separates the two. It reports performance by site, so the site looks like the problem while the constraint sits upstream.

What 214 Patient Responses Revealed

A Market Feasibility Test (MFT) recruits real patients in target markets and screens them against a protocol's eligibility criteria before site selection.

A Parkinson's MFT made the gap measurable:

Every added site would have screened the same population to the same result. More capacity multiplies the cost of the gap without moving the enrollment number.

From the patient's side, the experience is worse than the dashboard shows.

Each of those 214 patients raised their hand for research. Most then learned they could not meet an eligibility requirement, and the conversation ended there. A bigger site network re-runs that experience across new geographies.

Run the Test Before You Build the Network

Run the MFT before you commit to a site network, and site selection starts from evidence:

• Qualification rates confirmed in each market, not assumed from prevalence.
• Willing, eligible patients identified before sites open.
• A site network sized to real recruitment potential, protecting budget and timeline.

Talk to Antidote about confirming recruitment potential before your next protocol reaches site selection.