According to the Center for Information and Study on Clinical Research Participation, $95 billion is spent on medical research in the U.S. each year, but only six percent of clinical trials are completed on time. One reason for that is the data-intensive nature of clinical trial recruitment. Clinicians and researchers typically have to manually cross reference patient data with criteria for thousands of available clinical trials — there are nearly 170,000 clinical trials in progress worldwide at any given time and more than 8,000 of them in progress at the Mayo Clinic alone.
What are other reasons besides from the patient recruitment timesink that explain why only six percent of clinical trials are completed on time?
