Purpose: This session will summarize and illustrate how the health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) community is supporting the design and implementation of clinical studies and how this is improving enrolment and retention.

Outline: Engaging patients in the design of clinical trials has been demonstrated to improve enrollment and retention. To date this has often been limited to engagement with small, non-representative samples of patients. However, recent efforts have enabled the insights of HEOR to be applied to the design of clinical studies. After summarizing the state of the art in engaging patients in clinical study design, the session will illustrate how HEOR is enabling study design optimization. The development of a patient study experience instrument will be covered as well as recent applications of preference methods to understand how study design impacts patients’ willingness to participate in studies. The use of both experience instruments and preference data to improve study design will be described.