Burnout among clinical-trial coordinators is no longer just a workforce-retention concern — it is starting to show up in enrollment numbers, Faro Health co-founder and CEO Scott Chetham argued in a published perspective this week.
The numbers Chetham cites are familiar individually. The CDC’s 2022 healthcare-worker survey found close to half of U.S. clinicians reporting at least one symptom of burnout. About 80% of clinical trials miss their original enrollment timelines. Attrition in randomized controlled trials typically runs 10% to 30%. A Tufts analysis concluded that roughly one-third of the data collected in late-phase trials is, in retrospect, not essential.
Chetham’s argument links them. When coordinators are buried in documentation, scheduling, and source-data verification, the patient-facing work that drives both first-visit engagement and follow-up retention is the first thing to give. Enrollment slips, then retention slips — and the trial slips its timeline.
His proposed remedy is design discipline, not more software. Sponsors and CROs need to decide before sign-off which endpoints are actually necessary, and treat every additional data point as a coordinator hour added to every visit. The piece makes one observation a site coordinator would recognize: late-stage protocol amendments that add “just one more” eCRF tend to be cheap on paper and expensive on the floor.
That dynamic, Chetham concludes, quietly transfers the cost of protocol complexity onto the few people who already absorb most of the slack — and shows up, a quarter or two later, on the enrollment dashboard the sponsor is watching.
Source: Scott Chetham, Faro Health, perspective on clinical-trial operations, May 2026.
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