RockEnrollers

Head to head

Elligo Health Research vs Acurian

Community practice records versus consumer-data outreach.

Model

Elligo Health Research

Site network

Acurian

Patient recruitment agency

In one line

Elligo Health Research

Brings trials to community physician practices and their patient records.

Acurian

Large-scale outreach using consumer data, part of a major CRO.

What they do

Elligo Health Research

Enables community and specialty practices to run trials, using access to health records to identify eligible patients inside an existing physician relationship rather than recruiting strangers.

Acurian

Uses large consumer and health databases to identify and contact likely-eligible patients at scale, including outbound telephone outreach, and can bolt onto its parent CRO's site network.

Pricing

Elligo Health Research

Per-study site network agreements, often per-patient-enrolled components.

Acurian

Enterprise programs, typically volume-based.

Strengths

Elligo Health Research

  • Patients come with a treating physician who already knows them
  • Record-based identification beats advertising for eligibility precision
  • Reaches patients who never search for trials

Acurian

  • Built for large Phase III programs needing national volume
  • Database-driven targeting reaches patients who never search for trials
  • Sits inside an established global CRO

Watch for

Elligo Health Research

  • Depends on which practices and specialties are live in your therapeutic area
  • Newly activated practices are inexperienced sites; expect training overhead

Acurian

  • It is part of a CRO group. Ask how the recruitment scope is contracted and what your options are if you want to replace it mid-study
  • Ask which outreach channels are used for your population and what response rates they produced in the same indication

Best for

Elligo Health Research

Indications managed in community practice — cardiometabolic, primary care, common specialties.

Acurian

Large, common-indication Phase III programs needing national volume.

Poor fit

Elligo Health Research

Highly specialized academic-centre indications.

Acurian

Rare disease, or sponsors wanting a vendor independent of their CRO.

Read more

Elligo Health Research

Full Elligo Health Research profile

Acurian

Full Acurian profile

When Elligo Health Research is the right call

Pick Elligo when you want to reach patients through community physicians who already treat them, in practices that do not normally run research.

When Acurian is the right call

Pick Acurian when you need national volume for a large Phase III and want outbound targeting of people who never look for trials.

How to actually decide

Ask Elligo how many of its practices sit in your indication and how long practice activation takes — the model dies on activation timelines. Ask Acurian how the recruitment scope is contracted inside the wider CRO group and what your options are if you want to replace it mid-study. Then compare both on cost per randomized patient rather than per responder.

Do not pick on capability decks. Give both the same brief — your protocol, your countries, your screen failure assumptions — and ask each for the referral-to- randomization ratio they achieved on the three most similar studies they have run. Then price both on cost per randomized patient. The comparison usually resolves itself at that point, and often reveals that neither is the problem: the enrollment assumptions in the protocol were wrong from the start.

Our sister publication Rock Enroll covers that diagnosis in depth for sponsors and CRO teams.