Recruitment Platform to match Researchers with Substance Using Participants - Project Summary
This proposal seeks to determine the feasibility and acceptability of developing an online platform to
facilitate participant recruitment and enrollment in drug abuse studies. This is an urgent area of research;
deaths from drug addiction and overdose, such as from opioids, have been rising steadily over the past two
decades and have become the leading cause of injury death in the United States. The federal government
spends over 1 billion dollars annually to fund drug abuse research, however, a large percentage goes toward
finding, recruiting, and enrolling participants. Recruitment and enrollment are costly and time-consuming for
investigators in all areas of research, but social and legal concerns further hinder participation in drug abuse
research. Online registries exist and are growing in popularity, but suffer from important limitations. Due to
advancements in technology and online advertising, all of these limitations can be addressed with a new
technology. We propose to build the first research volunteer website that streamlines the enrollment process
into an integrated, identity-validated platform—including participant registration recruitment, eligibility
screening, informed-consent, and survey administration. This will reduce the effort and cost needed to begin
drug abuse studies, provide an acceptable means for drug users to interact with researchers, and improve data
quality and security. We are first focusing this technology in the drug abuse space because of the tremendous
difficulty in recruiting drug abuse participants and the growing market in this area. As of this writing, there are
400 clinical trials funded by NIDA actively recruiting participants. The pharmaceutical industry, which has a
large stake in drug addiction research, spends 1.89 billion dollars per year on participant enrollment in studies
(40% of the industry's collective clinical trial budget). Once it has been tested in this area, the platform model
can be scaled and commercialized to many other areas. More than $2.3 billion was spent on patient
recruitment to health research in 2010, and such expenditures are growing 15% annually. Therefore, this
platform has enormous potential for both commercialization and public health impact. In Phase I, we will build
the platform and conduct a 12-week pilot study with interested researchers and participants. We propose the
following specific aims to address this research: (1) assess the feasibility of the platform, (2) assess the
acceptability/usability of the platform to participants, and (3) assess the acceptability/usability of the platform to
researchers. Our team includes the former CFO of Epic Systems (and two-time successful entrepreneur), the
Associate Chief Medical Information Officer for Cedars-Sinai, a patent attorney at a large Silicon Valley
intellectual property firm specializing in digital health portfolios, as well as clinical and research experts who
conducted the formative research studies leading up to this application.
