P3‐525: EVALUATION OF FREE MEMORY SCREENING AS A RECRUITMENT STRATEGY

Abstract

Meeting recruitment enrollment goals is an ongoing challenge for clinical researchers. Most potential participants do not consent or qualify to enroll. In order to allocate the appropriate resource to recruitment, we needed to know what proportion of community members that participate in a given recruitment program would enroll in a clinical study. Memory screening has been our most successful recruitment strategy in recent years, so this program was the focus of our evaluation. We established ongoing Institutional Review Board approval to use our operations database as a research recruitment registry in 2016. Quarterly memory screening dates were set in 2017. With ten exam rooms reserved in half-hour appointments, and one large conference room supplied with outreach materials and staff, we set the capacity to screen and recruit 120 participants on each date. Undergraduate and graduate students were trained to administer the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), Story A from the Logical Memory subtest of the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised. Research assistants were trained to review screening results with participants, to answer any questions and provide information about enrolling research studies that may be a match to the individual if they are interested. Services were offered in English and Spanish. In early January, we secured a newspaper article in the local newspaper about memory in aging and Alzheimer's with an announcement about our upcoming memory screening. We screened 244 people at three events in our La Jolla Location. Following the assessment, participants were provided written feedback about their memory to bring to the resource room, share with a physician, or retain as a baseline. Participants used the resource room mostly to learn about our community partners’ services to seniors. Of the total number of persons screened, 174 individuals consented to be included in our research registry. From that group, a total of 31 have enrolled in the Shiley-Marcos Alzheimer's Disease Research Center longitudinal study. Seventy-one percent of memory screening participants agreed to enroll in a clinical study, thirteen percent enrolled in the first year. Knowing this return on investment facilitates planning.

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