Currently submitted to: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Oct 20, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 21, 2026 - Dec 16, 2026
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Recruiting Pregnant, Recently Miscarried, and Postpartum Women with Opioid Use Disorder into Research: Lessons from Electronic Health Record-Based and Digital Recruitment
ABSTRACT
Recruiting pregnant, recently miscarried, and postpartum women with opioid use disorder (OUD) for research presents unique challenges, including stigma, distrust, and logistical barriers. In this paper, we share lessons learned from our EHR-based recruitment efforts, highlighting both obstacles and successful strategies for engaging this vulnerable and often underrepresented population. Key challenges included managing multiple responses, navigating recruitment and communication barriers, and maintaining participant engagement. Successes were achieved by using ICD-10-based diagnoses to identify patients, employing multiple recruitment approaches, using culturally sensitive messaging, providing incentives, and offering flexible recruitment options. We also discuss future applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to support patient recruitment workflows. These insights offer practical guidance for researchers and underscore the need to explore ethical, AI-enhanced approaches to improve recruitment efficiency, data quality, and participant experience in addiction research.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.