Enhancing communication and social engagement among clinicians and research teams to improve reliability of research recruitment

[摘要] The success of rare disease research relies heavilyon robust partnerships with clinicians to help identifynew patients and collect samples. Many studies forpaediatric rheumatic diseases requiring pretreatmentsamples have suffered from slow enrolment rates dueto the low incidence of disease and relative urgency totreat. Therefore, timely identification of all potentiallyeligible patients is crucial. The objective of this projectwas to apply quality improvement methods to increasethe frequency and timeliness of identification of eligiblepatients with new paediatric rheumatic diagnoses toapproach for research studies. A retrospective chartreview was undertaken in our paediatric rheumatologyclinic to measure the number of eligible patients identifiedfor potential research recruitment between missedrecruitment opportunities. Improvement methodology wasused to integrate standardised communication betweenclinicians and the research team into clinic workflow, toleverage social feedback as positive reinforcement forgood communication and to measure change in responseto the interventions. The number of eligible patientsidentified between missed recruitment opportunitiesincreased from every 0–1 patient to every 14 patientsduring the project period, corresponding to an increasein the overall identification rate from 32% to 91% of alleligible patients. Quality improvement methods can beused to successfully integrate research recruitment intoroutine clinical care and accelerate advances necessary toimprove health outcomes.

[学科分类] 药学