How ALSA Research Prescreens 150+ Participants Per Week with Delfa

Sam Stein is building on something his family started three decades ago. As CEO of ALSA Research, he's taken the reins of a clinical research site network with deep roots in Connecticut and ambitious plans for the future.

With sites in Bridgeport and Stamford, plus a newly opened Manhattan location that landed its first study in 2026, ALSA is scaling rapidly. That growth, combined with a shifting clinical research landscape, prompted ALSA to rethink its approach to recruitment.

Before Delfa, recruitment at ALSA was a duct-taped operation. A CTMS containing 30,000 people and multiple social media campaigns were glued together by a sprawling spreadsheet. "This was a complete mess," Sam admits. Recruiters made manual calls, speed-to-lead was a constant problem, and an estimated 70% of leads were never reached before reactivation cadences kicked in.

"Before we started using Delfa, recruitment for us was really manual. It was time intensive. We had hit the limits of what the tools that we were using could provide to us," Sam says. "We needed a solution that was more intuitive when it comes to managing the recruiting funnel."

ALSA chose Delfa because it delivered on the fundamentals:

• Voice quality that earns engagement: "People were not only picking up the phone, but engaging and staying on the phone for the entirety of the pre-screening," Sam reports. Delfa's multi-study agents reach over 50% of the participants they call, and roughly 30% of leads complete a full pre-screen on the platform.
• Multi-study pre-screening: a single Delfa conversation can qualify a patient for several open protocols at once, maximizing the value of every contact.
• Bidirectional CRIO integration: "All of that information is pushed back into CRIO," meaning the rest of the team never has to leave their normal CTMS workflow.
• Web forms with instant outreach: "Somebody can go from entering their information on a website to getting engaged by the platform within one minute or less, versus before where it might have taken a couple hours or even a couple days."
• A funnel built for visibility: a Kanban-style view lets Sam see exactly where every lead sits, study by study.

The numbers tell the story of what's changed at ALSA. Over the last six months, Delfa has powered more than 15,000 calls and text messages. The agent now runs over 150 pre-screens per week, and ALSA has pre-qualified over 300 people for weight-loss studies through Delfa alone.

"Delfa is allowing us to operate at a scale that wouldn't have been possible with the small recruiting team that we had in-house," Sam says. "Where we've really found the value is that we can use Delfa just to whittle it down to a smaller pool of people that then our team of recruiters can call back and confirm their information and really talk to them about the study."

Reactivating previously unreachable leads has been an especially powerful use case. The ALSA team now builds lists of old database participants and re-engages them at scale with Delfa. Leads that had effectively gone cold are suddenly back in the funnel.

What separates Delfa from a typical software purchase, Sam says, is the pace of partnership. "The team listens with every weekly call resulting in shipped features." The product has evolved alongside ALSA's needs, becoming what Sam describes as "an execution layer to empower an already pretty strong lean team" rather than a system replacement that forces new ways of working.

"You guys have become very quickly an essential part of our business," Sam says. "Recruitment is humming along. I feel like we got that in a really good spot."