Social Media : A Recruitment Tool for Clinical Trials

For a successful and efficient completion of Clinical Trial, the poor recruitment is a major obstacle.  A recent survey of corresponding authors of randomized trials found that nearly 60 minutes had either didn't meet their recruitment target or needed an extended recruitment period.  Insufficient recruitment of study participants could result in losing the statistical power of a predictive conclusion, likewise as prolonging the time and increasing the cost related to the study.

The path to recruitment is usually the much story in randomized clinical trials. While even failed results and conclusions of experiments are reported, inefficient recruitment methods often go unreported. Studies assessing effective recruitment methods are far too scarce. The few systematic reviews that have addressed this issue stress the lack of generalization of recruitment methods given the degree of subjectivity with respect to a particular study design, intervention type, and the nature of participation needed by volunteers.

The issue of poor recruitment becomes even more exaggerated when the target of a study is a special population like women in the perceptional period or during pregnancy. Risk perception with a clinical intervention during this period is often skewed from ‘actual risk’ to ‘imagined risk’ given this state of vulnerability and fears of coercion. As a result, there's an excellent want for the assessment of recruitment methods in special populations, like women in the perceptional amount, that aren't only efficient but also cost-effective.

With the arrival of the net and medical info being accessible on the net in recent years, volunteers collaborating in clinical trials have touched far from being “patients” to “informed health-care consumers”.  Many people thoroughly search their symptoms on the internet before they commit to visit a doctor who assigns them a diagnosing.  About one-third of American adult access social media for health matters. A survey conducted by the Opinion analysis Corporation incontestable that fifty nine of adults within the USA use the net to seek health information, creating it the foremost standard possibility over seeking similar information from a health care provider.

The accessibility of medical info on the net has not solely made modern-day patients more aware, however also more involved in their personal healthcare. Thus, social media to expose clinical trialsto a bigger subject population looks like a noticeable next step in making an attempt to optimize recruitment methods. Social media is usually on-line platform which will modify dialogue among people and online communities, serving as a website for info dissemination and discussion.