ResearchMatch: a national registry to recruit volunteers for clinical research

Abstract

The authors designed ResearchMatch, a disease-neutral, Web-based recruitment registry to help match individuals who wish to participate in clinical research studies with researchers actively searching for volunteers throughout the United States. In this article, they describe ResearchMatch's stakeholders, workflow model, technical infrastructure, and, for the registry's first 19 months of operation, utilization metrics. Having launched volunteer registration tools in November 2009 and researcher registration tools in March 2010, ResearchMatch had, as of June 2011, registered 15,871 volunteer participants from all 50 states. The registry was created as a collaborative project for institutions in the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) consortium. Also as of June 2011, a total of 751 researchers from 61 participating CTSA institutions had registered to use the tool to recruit participants into 540 active studies and trials. ResearchMatch has proven successful in connecting volunteers with researchers, and the authors are currently evaluating regulatory and workflow options to open access to researchers at non-CTSA institutions.

Figure 1

Growth in the populations of volunteers and researchers who registered with ResearchMatch during its first19 months of operation (November 2009 – June 2011). ResearchMatch did not start registering researchers until about four months after starting to register volunteers in order to first build a pool of volunteers who might fit researchers search criteria.

Figure 2

Volunteer response rate to researcher-initiated study contact messages during ResearchMatch’s first 19 months of operation (November 2009 – June 2011). Each data point represents, for a single study, the number of volunteers contacted by researchers (x-axis) and the number of volunteers who expressed interest in receiving more information about that particular study (y-axis). Overall, approximately one of every five volunteers responded positively.