Improving Clinical trial Education, Recruitment, and Enrollment at CTSA Hubs (I-CERCH)

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A recent analysis shows that nearly 1 in 5 clinical trials either terminated for failed participant accrual, or completed with <85% of the expected enrollment. These recruitment challenges ultimately reduce the speed with which advances in medicine reach the general population. Recruitment strategies should at the forefront of protocol development discussions; however, clinical research teams often discuss recruitment strategies only after crude patient estimates suggest feasibility, and after a study protocol has been written, approved by an IRB, and is ready to enroll the first patient. Not surprisingly, study coordinators then find themselves with the difficult task of recruiting patients who meet narrow inclusion criteria, and retaining participants through numerous (sometimes onerous) study visits. The Recruitment Innovation Center program has the potential to truly transform the research recruitment and enrollment landscape. We propose a set of innovative, integrated solutions to recruitment and enrollment challenges that accommodate real ethical, regulatory, legal, practical, and technical constraints faced by investigators. These will be available through the Improving Clinical Trial Education, Recruitment and Enrollment at CTSA Hubs (I-CERCH) Center. Solutions will be available to investigators for every stage of recruitment: foundational recruitment education, study cohort identification and estimation, community engagement, pre-screening, informed consent, enrollment and retention monitoring, and returning of research results. Underlying our solutions will be a national, disease-neutral and informatics supported system that supports enrollment for individual trials. We will build upon existing recruitment and data tools and resources already in use by our team and others (e.g. ResearchMatch8, RecordCounter, REDCap9,TrialFinder, and SubjectLocater) to assemble a sophisticated informatics-based recruitment infrastructure. The informatics infrastructure will be paired with study-specific support provided by recruitment specialists, customizable recruitment materials, and meaningful community engagement. I-CERCH will be led by Paul Harris, PhD, who will serve as PI responsible informatics development, and Consuelo H. Wilkins, MD, MSCI, who will serve as PI of community and stakeholder engagement. Partnerships with 4 other CTSAs provide broad understanding of CTSA needs and key expertise. The specific aims of the program are as follows: 1) Provide a national home and collaborative `storefront' for the creation, storing, and sharing of recruitment education, programs, and best practices; 2) Catalyze enrollment by developing and disseminating novel technical and procedural approaches to support researchers in recruiting participants; 3) Enhance national awareness of research through patient education, and facilitate participant identification of studies with novel online patient facing tools; and 4) Conduct rigorous studies on methods to enhance recruitment efficacy/efficiency and make modifications based on these data.