Pharmaceutical Study Recruitment with Olivia

Pharmaceutical studies have no margin for error in recruitment. Every participant must meet strict eligibility criteria, every appointment must be tracked, and every data point must be accounted for. Olivia provides the structure to manage these demands across the full study lifecycle, from enrollment through attendance reporting, without relying on spreadsheets or paper-based workflows.

Structuring Your Study

Olivia organizes every project around modes and products, which map directly to pharmaceutical study designs:

  • Modes for study phases or visit types: Define each type of appointment as a mode. A screening visit, a baseline assessment, a treatment session, and a follow-up check could each be a separate mode with its own duration. This keeps your schedule organized when a single study requires multiple visit types across different timeframes.
  • Products for treatment arms or cohorts: If your study compares treatment groups, dosage levels, or patient cohorts, each one becomes a product. A Phase II trial comparing three dosage arms would have three products, each with its own recruitment targets.

This structure lets you manage complex study designs within a single project. A study with screening visits, two treatment arms, and quarterly follow-ups all lives in one place with independent tracking for each combination.

Defining Eligibility Criteria

Precise screening is non-negotiable in pharmaceutical research. Olivia provides two question types to capture eligibility data:

  • Single choice questions for categorical criteria: age range, diagnosis category, current medication status, prior study participation, or contraindication flags. Predefined answers enforce consistency across recruiters and eliminate ambiguity.
  • Open text questions for detailed clinical information: current medications and dosages, medical history notes, referring physician, or specific lab values that need to be recorded.

Mark any question as required to ensure recruiters cannot complete a participant profile without providing critical eligibility data. This is particularly important for pharmaceutical studies where missing a single criterion could compromise study integrity or participant safety.

Questions appear in the order you set via drag-and-drop, so you can arrange them to follow your screening protocol. Short versions of questions serve double duty: they become concise column headers in Excel exports (useful for data management teams) and dynamic placeholders in PDF appointment letters.

The entire question set can be exported to a JSON file and imported into future projects. If your organization runs similar trials, you build your standard eligibility screener once and reuse it.

Planning Multi-Phase Schedules

Pharmaceutical studies frequently span weeks or months with different appointment types on different days. Olivia gives you two ways to build this schedule:

  • Form-based slot creation for visits with specific constraints. For example, create 20 screening appointment slots on Monday mornings, each restricted to a particular treatment arm. You set the mode, date, time, slot name, number of slots, and optional product restrictions, then create them all at once.
  • Excel import for high-volume scheduling. Download a project-specific template, fill in your full study calendar, and upload it. This is efficient when you need hundreds of follow-up slots spread across months.

Slots can be restricted to specific products, which is essential for pharmaceutical studies. A treatment session slot restricted to "Dosage Arm B" will only appear when a recruiter selects that cohort during booking. This prevents scheduling errors where a participant ends up in the wrong treatment arm.

You can also create slots in a blocked state. Blocked slots cannot be booked by recruiters until an administrator unblocks them. This is useful for releasing appointment availability in phases as enrollment milestones are reached.

Managing Enrollment Quotas

Olivia's three-tier quota system maps directly to enrollment management:

  • Target quota: The number of participants your protocol requires per treatment arm and visit type. If you need 50 participants in Dosage Arm A, that is your target.
  • Total quota: Target plus a buffer for anticipated dropouts, screen failures, and no-shows. Setting a total of 60 when your target is 50 accounts for a 20% attrition rate.
  • Open quota: Decreases automatically with each booking. When it reaches zero, no more participants can be enrolled for that combination. This prevents over-enrollment, which matters when regulatory approvals specify maximum cohort sizes.

Quotas are tracked per product and per mode. You always know exactly how many more participants are needed for each treatment arm at each study phase.

Enrolling Participants

The booking flow is designed for speed without sacrificing accuracy. Recruiters select the treatment arm, pick an available appointment slot, and enter the participant's name. The entire process takes moments.

After booking, the recruiter fills in participant details on a dedicated profile page: contact information, gender, date of birth, address, and answers to all eligibility questions. Required questions must be completed before the profile is considered finalized.

Respondent statuses track communication and confirmation state throughout the enrollment process:

  • Default: Initial enrollment, no confirmation yet.
  • Confirmed (Self) or Confirmed (Request): The participant has confirmed their appointment.
  • Request Change: The participant has requested a reschedule.
  • Cancelled: The participant has withdrawn.

These statuses are color-coded on the dashboard for quick scanning: green for confirmed, yellow for change requests, red for cancellations. If a participant withdraws and you need to free their appointment for a replacement, an administrator can delete the respondent record, which resets the slot to open status and makes it available for new enrollment.

When multiple site coordinators or recruiters are enrolling simultaneously, Olivia prevents conflicts through database-level locking. A selected slot is temporarily held while the recruiter completes the entry. If two people reach for the same slot at the same moment, only one succeeds. The other is redirected to select a different slot. No double-enrollments, no manual coordination required.

Communicating Protocol Updates

Study protocols can change: new inclusion criteria, adjusted visit windows, updated dosing instructions. Project messages let administrators post a rich-text notice that appears prominently on the booking page before any recruiter starts a new enrollment. Everyone on the team sees the latest instructions without relying on separate email chains or messaging apps.

Message history is preserved, so you have a record of what was communicated and when.

Generating Appointment Documentation

For each enrolled participant, generate a PDF appointment letter from a fully customizable template. The WYSIWYG editor supports formatted text, your organization's logo, and dynamic placeholders:

  • {{respondent}} and {{salutation}} for personalized addressing
  • {{product}} for the treatment arm or cohort name
  • {{appointment}} and {{duration}} for visit logistics
  • {{address}} for the participant's mailing address
  • {{QRCode}} for a scannable code used at site check-in
  • Any question with a short version becomes a placeholder. A question with short version PatientID allows you to print {{PatientID}} directly on the letter.

Paper size (A4 or Letter) and language (English or German) are configurable. Templates can be exported and imported between projects, saving setup time for multi-site studies or recurring trial designs.

On-site Visit Management

On study visit days, Olivia's Study Live dashboard replaces paper sign-in sheets with a real-time operational view:

  • Upcoming visits: A table showing all participants expected within a configurable time window. Color-coding highlights urgency: red for participants who are past their appointment time, yellow for those arriving within 15 minutes.
  • Currently on-site: A separate table showing all checked-in participants with elapsed time since arrival. This is valuable for tracking visit durations and identifying participants who may need assistance.
  • QR code check-in: Participants present the QR code from their appointment letter. A camera scan checks them in instantly with no manual data entry and no transcription errors.
  • Labels for participant IDs: Enable the label prompt at check-in to assign study-specific identifiers (e.g., "SCR-042", "TRT-B-017") that appear on the dashboard and in exports. This bridges the gap between Olivia's booking system and your internal study database.
  • No-show tracking: Mark absent participants directly from the dashboard. Their slot status changes immediately and clinic statistics update in real time.
  • Check-out recording: When a participant leaves, check them out to record the departure time. The duration between check-in and check-out is calculated automatically and included in exports.

The dashboard auto-refreshes every 30 seconds, keeping the view current for site staff without manual intervention.

Monitoring Enrollment and Visit Progress

Olivia's analytics suite provides continuous visibility into study progress:

  • Recruiting status: A detailed breakdown showing target, gross enrollment, current active participants, and open slots per treatment arm and visit type. You can immediately identify which cohort is lagging and needs additional recruitment effort.
  • Clinic status: During active study visits, this view shows show, no-show, and screened-out counts per treatment arm with a chance percentage indicating the likelihood of reaching your target based on remaining scheduled visits. If a treatment arm has a high no-show rate, you see it here in real time.
  • Screened-out tracking: If participants are disqualified during on-site screening (e.g., they do not meet lab value thresholds on the day of their visit), a screened-out column appears automatically in the clinic status table.
  • Recruitment timeline: Enrollment over time grouped by treatment arm. Useful for monitoring whether enrollment pace is meeting regulatory timelines.
  • Recruiting efficiency: Average time from initial enrollment to appointment, and lead time between booking and visit date. Rising values may indicate participant hesitancy or logistical bottlenecks.
  • Recruiter throughput: Enrollment counts and show rates per recruiter. If one site coordinator consistently has lower show rates, it may signal a need for better participant preparation or follow-up.
  • Target forecast: Projects when enrollment targets will be reached based on recent pace (7-day and 14-day averages). Essential for reporting to sponsors and planning site resource allocation.

Secure Data Handling

Pharmaceutical study data demands careful handling. Olivia is hosted in Germany and operates under strict data protection standards. Additional security features include:

  • Two-factor authentication: Available for all user accounts, adding a layer of protection for accessing participant data.
  • Role-based access: Three roles (Owner, Administrator, Recruiter) ensure that team members only see and do what they need to. Recruiters can only access their own enrollments. Administrators have full project access but cannot delete the project. Only the owner can delete the project.

Exporting Data for Analysis and Compliance

Export all enrollment data to a styled Excel file at any time. The export includes participant name, contact details, gender, date of birth, address, treatment arm, visit type, appointment date, slot status, respondent status, check-in and check-out timestamps with calculated visit duration, all screening answers, recruiter name, label, and notes.

Admins receive a complete export across the entire project, including admin-only notes. Recruiters receive only their own enrollments where all required questions have been answered.

This export serves multiple purposes: feeding data management systems, generating enrollment reports for sponsors, reconciling attendance for participant compensation, and maintaining records for regulatory review.

Olivia brings structure and real-time visibility to pharmaceutical study recruitment. Instead of tracking enrollment across disconnected spreadsheets and paper logs, your team works in a single system where quotas, schedules, eligibility data, and attendance are always current. The result is fewer enrollment errors, faster cohort completion, and cleaner data for the studies that matter.