JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Participant recruitment, especially for frail elderly hospitalized patients, remains one of the greatest challenges for many research groups. Traditional recruitment methods such as chart reviews or word of mouth notifications for patients in the inpatient setting are often inefficient, low-yielding, time consuming and expensive. Silent Best Practice Alert (BPA) systems have previously been used to improve clinical care but not in clinical research.

Objective:

This pilot project examined a new EPIC BPA system developed to identify potentially eligible participants in real time to help research teams maximize recruitment accuracy and efficiency of resources. We hypothesized that this tool would reduce the daily screening time, the number of missed potential participants as well as the overall cost needed to recruit the targeted number of patients.

Methods:

The BPA system was jointly developed by a clinical research and electronic medical records implementation/management team at Partners Healthcare. The was developed and pilot tested in an observational clinical trial to enroll patients admitted for acute exacerbation of chronic pulmonary disease (COPD). We compared the BPA system with our usual method of patient identification (chart reviews and word of mouth referrals) and evaluated for daily screening time, number of missed potential participants as well as the overall cost needed to recruit the targeted number of patients.

Results:

559 potentially eligible patients were identified through the two screening methods compared. Of those, 460 patients were identified by both methods, with 99 found by just the Epic Workbench Method and 42 identified by just the silent BPA method. Of the 99 identified by the Epic Workbench, only 12 (12.12%) were considered eligible. Of the 42 identified by the silent BPA method, 30 (71.43%) were considered eligible. A total of 319 “Eligible” patients were identified, and of those 60 participants enrolled in the Emerald-COPD Study. Since implementation, the silent BPA system has found an equivalent of 3 additional patients per week. From the comparison, the silent BPA screening method was shown to be approximately 4 times (23.58%) faster than our previous screening method, projected to save 442.5 hours over the duration of the study.

Conclusions:

Automation of the recruitment process has allowed us to identify potential participants in real time and avoid missing patients. Silent BPA screening is a considerably faster method which allows for more efficient use of resources. This innovative and instrumental functionality can be specified to the needs of other research studies hoping to utilize the electronic medical records system for participant recruitment.