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. 2016 Jun 29;18(6):e144.
doi: 10.2196/jmir.4726.

Trial Promoter: A Web-Based Tool for Boosting the Promotion of Clinical Research Through Social Media

Katja Reuter  1 , Francis Ukpolo, Edward Ward, Melissa L Wilson, Praveen Angyan
Affiliations

Trial Promoter: A Web-Based Tool for Boosting the Promotion of Clinical Research Through Social Media

Katja Reuter et al. J Med Internet Res. .

Abstract

Background: Scarce information about clinical research, in particular clinical trials, is among the top reasons why potential participants do not take part in clinical studies. Without volunteers, on the other hand, clinical research and the development of novel approaches to preventing, diagnosing, and treating disease are impossible. Promising digital options such as social media have the potential to work alongside traditional methods to boost the promotion of clinical research. However, investigators and research institutions are challenged to leverage these innovations while saving time and resources.

Objective: To develop and test the efficiency of a Web-based tool that automates the generation and distribution of user-friendly social media messages about clinical trials.

Methods: Trial Promoter is developed in Ruby on Rails, HTML, cascading style sheet (CSS), and JavaScript. In order to test the tool and the correctness of the generated messages, clinical trials (n=46) were randomized into social media messages and distributed via the microblogging social media platform Twitter and the social network Facebook. The percent correct was calculated to determine the probability with which Trial Promoter generates accurate messages.

Results: During a 10-week testing phase, Trial Promoter automatically generated and published 525 user-friendly social media messages on Twitter and Facebook. On average, Trial Promoter correctly used the message templates and substituted the message parameters (text, URLs, and disease hashtags) 97.7% of the time (1563/1600).

Conclusions: Trial Promoter may serve as a promising tool to render clinical trial promotion more efficient while requiring limited resources. It supports the distribution of any research or other types of content. The Trial Promoter code and installation instructions are freely available online.

Keywords: Facebook; Internet; Twitter; algorithm; automation; clinical trial; communication; online; patient; recruitment; social media; social network.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: None declared.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Trial Promoter (TP) setup and data flow. The elements in blue represent functional TP modules. CSV: comma-separated values; REST API: representational state transfer application programming interface.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Local Trial Promoter interface that shows imported clinical trial information and disease keywords that were included in the test messages.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Local Trial Promoter interface shows parameterized message templates for Twitter and Facebook that were used during testing.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Local Trial Promoter interface shows key performance indicator data for each message. This example shows Twitter messages.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Examples of messages that Trial Promoter generated and published automatically.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Trial Promoter is designed to facilitate two phases of the clinical trial recruitment process: the promotion (advertisement) and engagement phases.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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