Informatics Approaches to Participant Recruitment

Abstract

Clinical research is essential to the advancement of medical science and is a priority for academic health centers, research funding agencies, and industries working to develop and deploy new treatments. In addition, the growing rate of biomedical discoveries makes conducting high-quality and efficient clinical research increasingly important. Participant recruitment continues to represent a major bottleneck in the successful conduct of human studies. Barriers to clinical research enrollment include patient factors and physician factors, as well as recruitment challenges added by patient privacy regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the USA. Another major deterrent to enrollment is the challenge of identifying eligible patients, which has traditionally been a labor-intensive procedure. In this chapter, we review the informatics interventions for improving the efficiency and accuracy of eligibility determination and trial recruitment that have been used in the past and that are maturing as the underlying technologies improve, and we summarize the common sociotechnical challenges that need continuous dedicated work in the future.