Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA)

What does Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) mean in clinical research?

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 makes it unlawful to call a cell phone using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice without the prior express consent of the called party, unless the call is for emergency purposes. The statute lets people recover $500 in damages for each violation, and a court may triple that for willful or knowing violations.^⁠[1]

In February 2024 the FCC confirmed that the TCPA's restrictions on artificial or prerecorded voice cover current AI technologies that generate human voices, so AI voice calls need prior express consent unless an exemption applies.^⁠[2] FCC rules also let people revoke consent by any reasonable means, including replying stop, and require callers to honor revocation within a reasonable time not to exceed 10 business days.^⁠[3]

Practical note: for trial outreach, document how each phone number and consent were obtained, disclose AI assistance, and honor opt-outs across every channel. Review the approach with counsel. Engage tells patients AI assistance is used and lets them reach a person at any time, by live transfer to a coordinator or a human callback, whichever the site prefers; see also the post on TCPA and AI outreach.

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.