216 - A New Model for Research Recruitment in a Developmental Behavioral Pediatric Clinic

Publication Number: 3208.216

Meredith Weaver, Boston Children's Hospital, Brookline, MA, United States; Katherine Pawlowski, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, United States; Stephanie J. Brewster, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, United States; William Barbaresi, Harvard Medical School; Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, United States

Background: Barriers to recruitment of children and adolescents as research participants include time, cost, contact burden on study staff and clinicians, potential confusion of multiple contacts for families, and challenges of equitable outreach to potential participants. When recruiting participants with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), added barriers include: expectations for research participation, the sensitive nature of diagnoses related to development, and behavior or communication challenges related to study activities.

Objective: Centralized Recruitment (CR) was designed to reduce burden on research teams and clinicians and ensure that all patients and families are informed about research studies. Here, we describe the functional operation of this model and how it facilitates recruitment in a pediatric NDD clinic.

Design/Methods: We integrated CR into the clinic workflow, introducing patients and families to multiple studies for which they were eligible through a single contact at the time of the clinic visit. We received weekly information about upcoming clinical visits, automatically filtered by study-specific inclusion and exclusion criteria, transferred from an Epic electronic medical record into an institutionally hosted REDCap data capture system. Individual study teams verified eligibility and a central CR staff member subsequently made contact in clinic or by phone, in English, with follow up email messages.

Results: The CR model has been used by 18 studies and a participant recruitment registry within two divisions in a large pediatric hospital. Study topics included genetic biomarkers, and co-occurring conditions in NDDs including autism and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, as well as learning and behavior, sensory and pain processing, and auditory and motor development. CR has reached approximately 170 families per month, and around 2,000 per year since 2021. Over 90% of families reached were willing to learn more about research. Only 5.97% declined future contact.

Conclusion(s): CR allows multiple studies to be presented to families efficiently at the time of their clinical visit in an outpatient NDD clinic. Future plans include expansion of the CR model for recruitment in languages other than English, and to systematically collect information about barriers to research participation from families approached through CR. This model shows promise to use centralization to expand research outreach in pediatric NDD clinics.