Innovations in Patient Recruitment Program

Request for Applications

Applications due: June 30, 2017

The Goal of the Innovations in Patient Recruitment Program

A goal of the UMass Center for Clinical and Translational Science (UMCCTS) is to support UMass researchers’ human subjects research through technological innovations. In collaboration with the UMCCTS Informatics Core and the Science Participation Resource Center, this opportunity seeks proposals for leveraging UMass Chan data-lake driven innovative techniques to identify and engage research participants, particularly among historically hard-to-reach patient populations. The UMCCTS Informatics Core has implemented several tools (UMass Chan Data Lake, i2b2, TrinetX, and Conquering Disease Volunteer Registry; see http://umassmed.edu/it/cdp/) to improve participant recruitment to ongoing clinical studies. The purpose of this funding is to enable us to measure the effectiveness of these tools to improve/accelerate recruitment to clinical research studies at the UMass Chan Medical School. UMass researchers who are currently conducting research studies and are facing recruitment challenges are encouraged to respond to this RFA to seek assistance from the UMCCTS Informatics Core to develop recruitment strategies that include cohort identification from EHR data in the Data Lake and EPIC research tools-based recruitment.

Commitment

• Collaborate with the UMCCTS Clinical Informatics Core in developing the appropriate recruitment strategy for your research project
• Evaluate the comparative effectiveness of the recruitment strategy with traditional methods
• Submit a recruitment methodology manuscript
• Incorporate funding request for recruitment strategies and informatics in an external grant application

Pilot Project Funding and Resources

Recruitment Innovation projects will receive funding in-kind through consultation support, computer programming, and computing resources provided by the UMCCTS Informatics Core.

If you have any questions: Please contact Jomol Mathew, PhD (jomol.mathew@umassmed.edu)