JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Lack of information, awareness, and misconceptions about clinical trials are major barriers to cancer clinical trial participation. Digital and social media are dominant sources of health information and offer optimal opportunities to improve public medical awareness and education by providing accurate and trust-worthy sources of health information from reliable sources. Infotainment, material intended to both entertain and inform, is an effective strategy for engaging and educating audiences that can be easily disseminated using social media and may be a novel way to improve awareness about clinical trials.

Objective:

The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether infotainment videos, disseminated using social media, could drive health information seeking behaviors related to cancer clinical trials.

Methods:

We created the Cancer Briefs video series, which comprised 3 videos focused on immunotherapy and clinicals trials (video 1), promotion of a specific clinical trial (video 2), and diversity in clinical trials (video 3). We instituted a dissemination and marketing process to measure video engagement and health information seeking behaviors among public audiences on social media.

Results:

Even with a very modest marketing budget, the Cancer Briefs video series substantially increased health information seeking behavior by increasing research organization webpage visits by 873.8% (video 1), 41,300% (video 2), and 3,682.2% (video 3).

Conclusions:

Our study shows that digital and social media tools can be tailored for specific target audiences, are scalable, and can be disseminated at low cost, making it an accessible educational, recruitment, retention strategy focused on improving the conduct of clinical trials.