Head to head

MMG vs Continuum Clinical

Communications-led versus site-engagement-led enrollment.

Model

MMG

Patient recruitment agency

Continuum Clinical

Patient recruitment agency

In one line

MMG

Communications-led agency covering recruitment, retention, and engagement.

Continuum Clinical

Recruitment and retention with strong site-engagement programs.

What they do

MMG

Approaches enrollment as a communications problem: study branding, patient-facing materials, site engagement programs, and retention alongside recruitment campaigns.

Continuum Clinical

Delivers end-to-end enrollment programs: patient outreach, site engagement and training, referral management, and retention, with a reputation for working closely with site staff rather than around them.

Pricing

MMG

Agency retainer and scoped deliverables, plus media where applicable.

Continuum Clinical

Program-scoped services.

Strengths

MMG

  • Strong creative and materials development, including IRB-ready assets
  • Retention programs, not only enrollment
  • Comfortable inside large sponsor governance processes

Continuum Clinical

  • Site engagement is a genuine specialty, not a line item
  • Retention and adherence programs
  • Experience across large multi-country programs

Watch for

MMG

  • Agency scoping can make it hard to tie spend to randomizations
  • Insist on a performance metric in the SOW

Continuum Clinical

  • Full-service scoping obscures channel-level performance unless you demand it

Best for

MMG

Large sponsors running long studies where dropout is as costly as slow enrollment.

Continuum Clinical

Multi-site programs where site under-performance, not lead volume, is the problem.

Poor fit

MMG

A small biotech that needs patients this quarter, not a brand system.

Continuum Clinical

A single-site study needing a quick digital burst.

When MMG is the right call

Pick MMG when the gap is awareness, messaging, and materials — including regulatory-reviewed patient-facing assets across many countries.

When Continuum Clinical is the right call

Pick Continuum Clinical when sites are the bottleneck and the work is site engagement, training, and keeping referral handling consistent.

How to actually decide

Look at where identical campaigns produce different results across your sites. Wide variance between sites in the same country is a site-performance problem, not a messaging problem. Ask each for the specific deliverables in month one and who at your organisation has to review them.

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.