Building an Infrastructure to Drive More Effective Patient Enrollment and Retention: Partnerships with Sites Summit 2025 Recap
We are pleased to share this recap of the Partnerships with Sites summit, September 15, 2025, for those who were able to attend, and those who could not.
To read the full recap, click here.
The Partnerships with Sites Summit challenged the site ecosystem to rethink the entire sponsor-CRO-site partnership model and build an infrastructure to drive more effective patient enrollment and recruitment.
The summit addressed the fundamental issues: rebuilding the relationship to address enrollment as the core unmet need; addressing the misalignment between sponsors, CROs and sites to truly meet the needs of patients; and engaging with sites early to operationalize the clinical trial design to reduce the burden to sites and patients.
After welcoming remarks from the 2025 chair Matthew Maxwell, two panels set the scene for the day. The first allowed attendees to hear directly from a diverse collection of sites on the imperative changes needed in clinical collaborations to enable greater patient enrollment. The second brought together pharma, site and solution provider stakeholders to discuss what true partnership would even look like.
There were success examples of sites and sponsors working together, resulting in enhanced strategic relationships and greater patient enrollment. Additional panels covered how to move beyond transactional relationships to build real trust, what sites and patients value in technologies for more efficient clinical trials, how to optimize the CRO/site partnerships, and emerging consolidation trends changing the clinical site ecosystem.
The site support soapbox section gave five companies an opportunity to present their solutions for supporting clinical trial sites, highlighting tools and strategies that streamline operations and improve site efficiencies in clinical trials. In the afternoon, industry sponsors showcased their case studies on the different ways they were supporting sites for patient enrollment.
This year’s Partnerships with Sites shared networking with its sister event, CRAACO: Clinical Research as a Care Option. Next year, we plan to combine both events to further help the industry’s goal of strengthening community-based clinical trials and to maximize networking. Going forward, we will be doing a quarterly editorial roundup under the branding of Partnerships with Sites that provides a broader range of content that supports community-based clinical trials.
