JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Web-based screening may be suitable for identifying individuals with pre-symptomatic latent diseases for recruitment to clinical studies, as such people do not visit hospitals in the pre-symptomatic stage. The promotion of such online screening studies is critical to their success, although it remains uncertain about the detailed effectiveness of the promotion, especially in terms of the difference between different promotion methods, different disease domains of interest, or different countries.

Objective:

The Japanese Trial-Ready Cohort (J-TRC) webstudy is our ongoing online screening registry to identify pre-symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease (AD) individuals, aimed at facilitating the clinical trials of AD prevention. Within the first 9 months since its launch on 2019 the J-TRC webstudy recruited thousands of online participants via multiple methods of promotions, including press releases, newspaper advertisements, web advertisements, or direct e-mail invitations. Here, we aimed to quantitatively evaluate the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of each of these multimodal promotion methods.

Methods:

We applied the vector-autoregression (VAR) model to assess the degree of contribution of each type of promotion to the following target metrics: the number of daily visitors to the J-TRC website, the number of daily registrants to the J-TRC webstudy, daily rate of registration among visitors, daily rate of eligible participants among registrants, or the median age of daily registrants. The average cost-effectiveness for each promotion method was also calculated using the total cost and the coefficients in the VAR model.

Results:

During the first 9 months of the reviewed period from October 31, 2019 to June 17, 2020, there were 48,334 website visitors and 4,429 registrations in total, of which 3,081 were eligible registrations. Initial press release reports and newspaper advertisements had a marked effect on increasing the number of daily visitors and daily registrants. Web listing advertisements significantly contributed to the increase in daily visitors but not to the daily registrants, and it also lowered the rate of registrations and the median age of daily participants. Visitors following the direct invitation e-mail to other cognitive registries were expected to register with the highest reliability. The calculated average cost-effectiveness for the initial press release was JP¥ 2,658 per visitor and JP¥ 10,376 per registrant, while the calculated average cost-effectiveness for the newspaper advertisements was JP¥ 3,093 per visitor and JP¥ 24,609 per registrant, respectively.

Conclusions:

Our multivariate time-series analysis showed that each promotion method has different features in their effect of recruiting participants to the J-TRC webstudy. Under the advertisement condition settings so far, newspaper advertisements and initial press releases were the most effective promotion methods, with a fairly-equivalent cost-effectiveness, as seen in earlier studies. These results would provide important suggestions for the future promotions of the recruitment of pre-symptomatic participants to AD clinical trials in Japan.