Citeline’s Patient Recruitment Pulse – July 2026 Edition

Welcome to the July 2026 edition of Citeline’s Patient Recruitment Pulse. In this monthly blog, we discuss the trends shaping today’s patient recruitment landscape. This month, we focus on the personal story of Madeline Naylor, Chief Clinical Officer, and how her experience informs her work to ensure patient access to clinical trials.

Cancer affects millions of people every year, from those diagnosed to their families, friends, and communities. Yet only a fraction of cancer patients participate in what could potentially be a lifesaving clinical trial.

Citeline took part in the 2026 edition of Rewriting Cancer, a branded content series presented by the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) and produced by BBC StoryWorks Commercial Productions, to help shine a light on the persistent challenge of patient access to clinical trials. Through Madeline’s personal story, Citeline’s episode focused on barriers to access and how they can be surmounted.

The goal: successfully matching patients to trials

The Citeline episode of Rewriting Cancer opens with Madeline running through a snow-covered landscape. She says she feels connected to her dad whenever she runs, since he traveled to every one of her track races in college.

Madeline lost her father to esophageal cancer in 2018, three years after he was diagnosed. She says her dad is her source of inspiration, and his loss directly connects to her work at Citeline.

One statistic stands out for Madeline: According to the Commission on Cancer, only about 7% of US cancer patients end up in clinical trials. This is true even though there are more than 36,000 active clinical trials for cancer in the US according to the World Health Organization. The problem isn’t lack of options, it’s connecting cancer patients with the right trials.

“My work is based on the principle that patients should feel empowered to access treatment options wherever they are,” Madeline says.

Working with tools like Citeline Patient Match, Madeline and her team use artificial intelligence (AI) and real-world data (RWD) — de-identified electronic health records, claims, and lab data — to find patients who fit a trial’s criteria, then reach out to their physicians to flag a potentially eligible patient and educate them on the trial.

In the episode, Suzanne Caruso, President, Clinical, Regulatory and Strategic Intelligence at Norstella (Citeline’s parent company), highlights another challenge. She notes clinical trial sites often can’t visualize a patient’s full journey across different sites and hospitals, so raising awareness and matching patients efficiently is critically important.

A successful trial, Suzanne says, is one that enrolls fully and on time. “The outcome for an oncology patient for a successful clinical trial can be years of life,” she adds.

“We were never presented the option of a clinical trial with my dad,” Madeline says. “But giving him that option could’ve meant that he could meet his grandson.”

Madeline closes the Rewriting Cancer episode with this thought: “We are impacting patients and we’re impacting their families and we’re also helping physicians.

“I’m very proud of the work I do. I know my dad would be very proud.”

A gap in trial awareness

In the webinar “Every Match Matters — Strategies for More Effective Patient Recruitment,” Madeline and Suzanne draw further on personal stories, decades of industry experience, and Citeline’s AI-powered real-world capabilities to discuss what it takes to close the gap between eligible patients and enrolled patients.

Madeline began her career as a clinician who met directly with patients. She says while she doesn’t meet directly with patients in her work at Citeline, she knows that “behind every clinical note, behind every data point that I’m reviewing, there are patients with stories, and such important stories. They have families. They have kids. They have jobs they love. They have pets. And that’s really what the core foundation of our work is, knowing that those patients just need options and need hope, and how we could bridge that gap for them.”

Suzanne’s first job out of university was consenting patients on a clinical trial. “It was one of the most fascinating experiences of my life because it really shows you that patients do want to be involved in clinical trials,” she says. “Actually, being given the opportunity to participate in a clinical trial, many patients took that opportunity and were excited to follow up years later about that.”

Madeline and Suzanne make the point that clinical trials don’t have a patient problem, they have an access problem. Both Suzanne and Madeline say in their work, they focus on making sure patients have access to trials that could help them.

When looking at how sponsors find patients for trials, Madeline and Suzanne reference AI and RWD as transforming that process. Citeline combines a linked data ecosystem containing claims, lab data, and electronic medical records (EMR) that include unstructured clinical notes with natural language processing (NLP) to surface eligibility signals that standard coding misses entirely. This system includes humans in the loop who have trained the AI over years of clinical expertise.

“Technology has been able to help us match protocols to patients,” Suzanne says. “We’re doing that with AI, but with human-in-the-loop AI. We still need those subject matter experts.”

Some of the next steps in recruitment recommended by Madeline and Suzanne include:

• Not solely relying on investigator databases. Cross-reference site performance data with real-world patient journey data to confirm sites are seeing the right patients at the right moment in their care.
• Thinking beyond the sites. Community healthcare practitioners (HCPs) nearby may be treating highly eligible patients without knowing a trial exists that could help these patients. Build referral pathways before the trial opens rather than waiting until enrollment lags.
• Using RWD to challenge inclusion/exclusion (I/E) criteria early in the protocol process. This way, the sponsor will know whether the criteria are realistic and where they’re likely to lose patients before they reach a site.
• Selecting a data solution that uses NLP on unstructured physician-dictated notes. This can surface patients who may be missed if only relying on ICD-10 diagnosis codes.

Laser-focused on patient recruitment solutions

In Citeline’s People Behind the Products series, Madeline goes into more detail about her day-to-day work. She says there are days where she works with Citeline’s clients to find out what they need and how they can be supported, then locating solutions based on those needs. “Not having direct patient access anymore, it’s nice to work with clients,” she says.

Some of Madeline’s days are spent on team collaboration, and others are spent in the data. “I spend a lot of time in our real-world data assets, especially diving into all our EMR data,” she says, adding that she reviews the de-identified patient clinical notes to find points of clinical attributes to match the patients with an appropriate trial. “On these days, I am doing data analysis, algorithm building, and working in our data to build our solutions,” she says.

Madeline says a key focus for her and her team is to utilize Citeline PatientMatch in the most effective way possible to help accelerate recruitment and enrollment goals for clients.

“We also are bringing to the market a new patient journey offering,” she says. “This allows our clients to see the end-to-end clinical journey for patients: how they’re presenting, when they’re presenting, who’s caring for that patient.”

She observes that clients come to Citeline at different points in their enrollment process. “Some trials are in protocol development, some are finding sites and assessing feasibility, some are ready to start enrollment. Our goal at Citeline is to be able to support throughout study creation and implementation, no matter where they are in their development. So, we’re adding efforts on how we can support earlier, integrating our real-world data with our Citeline data.”

Madeline says clinical trials are continually growing in complexity, leading to screen fail for many patients because of the number of criteria they have to meet. It also creates burden for site staff, challenging their enrollment goals and timelines.

“We’re hoping we see accelerated enrollment in clinical trials,” she says. “Faster enrollment means bringing more drugs to market faster. Trials have the potential to be life-changing for patients and their families.”

Watch the entire Rewriting Cancer series to discover the stories of people living and working with cancer, from busting the myths and misconceptions to bettering diagnosis, treatments, and lives.

Find out more about how Citeline helps close the gaps in traditional patient recruitment methods to enable faster, more precise location of the right patients.