Transforming Recruitment Strategies in Clinical Research

Research is the lifeblood of health care, and a core Cleveland Clinic mission. Recruiting participants is key, but is often the Achilles heel in the research process. Identifying eligible participants and requesting their participation is a challenge. We have used technology and the EHR to innovate efficient electronic recruitment strategies. Examples include:

• Subject identification, electronic consenting, and automated phenotyping improvements for the Cleveland Clinic BioRepository (CC-BioR). We accelerated recruitment 20-fold while reducing cost 5-fold. CC-BioR enrolled 1,172 subjects and collected 3,565 blood and cardiac tissue samples with significant cost savings over traditional methods.
• Streamlining overall recruitment. We recruited 949 patients via MyChart in 2020-2021. On average, we recruited >100 patients/study; without the MyChart recruitment process, the typical previous enrollment rate was <10 patients/year.