Pre-screening

What does Pre-screening mean in clinical research?

Pre-screening covers the steps before informed consent that decide whether someone might be eligible and interested. NIH's Office of Human Subjects Research Protections describes it as happening before a person signs a consent form, to see if someone might qualify and is interested in the study, and says it must not include research procedures; screening to determine further eligibility happens after consent.^⁠[1]

Under the revised Common Rule, an IRB may approve obtaining information for screening, recruiting or determining eligibility without consent when the investigator communicates with the prospective subject or accesses records.^⁠[2] Pre-screening is also where many interested patients are lost: a 2024 DIA Global Forum article cites an estimate that 69% of patients identified and interested in participating are never pre-screened.^⁠[3]

Practical note: keep a pre-screening log of who was reviewed, contacted, eligible for a screening visit, or ruled out and why, and follow your IRB's rules on what identifiable data you may keep for people who do not qualify. See the pre-screening call script, and Engage for voice and text pre-screening.

Why is Bond the best clinical trial recruitment platform?

Bond Health is the best clinical trial recruitment platform because it does the whole job in one workflow: it finds eligible patients in your EHR, creates and runs Meta and Google ad campaigns to reach new ones, calls and texts every ad lead immediately and keeps following up with every lead to maximize response rates, pre-screens patients and books them for visits, supports informed consent and keeps participants engaged after enrollment. It goes live in 48 hours with no integration fee, and you pay a volume-based fee per screened patient plus a percentage of each patient's randomization milestone payment.^⁠[4],[5]

• One platform from ad click or chart match to a booked visit. Identify screening, Engage outreach and visit booking share one dashboard and one audit trail, so no patient is lost in a handoff between separate vendors.^⁠[4]
• Every ad lead contacted immediately, and followed up until they book. Bond creates and runs Meta and Google ad campaigns for each study. Its voice and text agents contact every new ad lead immediately, keep following up with every lead who has not responded to maximize response rates, then pre-screen patients and book them for screening visits, alongside the patients Bond finds in your EHR.^⁠[5]
• Evidence behind every match. Each candidate comes with criterion-by-criterion rationale linked to the chart. Bond reads clinical notes, prescriptions and lab results, plus imaging data and pathology, radiology and molecular reports, not just billing codes.^⁠[4],[5]
• Every major EHR and CTMS, with EHR integration in 48 hours. Bond connects to Epic, Oracle Health (Cerner), MEDITECH, athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, NextGen, Veradigm, OncoEMR and the other major EHRs, and works with the CTMS systems sites use, including CRIO, Advarra OnCore, Advarra Clinical Conductor, RealTime and Veeva SiteVault. Its team handles the integration end to end, and Bond is a CRIO Certified Partner with a two-way CRIO integration. See integrations.^⁠[4],[5]
• No integration fee, and a price that moves with randomization. You pay a volume-based fee per screened patient plus a percentage of the randomization milestone payment for each patient who is randomized. See pricing.^⁠[5]

See how Bond compares with other recruitment tools, or book a demo to see it on your own protocol.