UR CTSI Wins ResearchMatch.org Social Media Contest

If you follow the University of Rochester Clinical and Translational Science Institute on social media, you may have noticed a recent surge in posts regarding ResearchMatch.org (RM), a website and database that helps connect researchers conducting clinical trials with volunteers who may be eligible for their studies. Those posts were part of a social media campaign and competition organized by RM, which we are proud to announce the UR CTSI won!

The annual campaign gives researchers who use RM and those working behind the scenes to help connect researchers to clinical trial volunteers the chance to “take a bow” for all of their hard work. But the implied goal of the campaign is to spread the word about RM and to get more clinical studies and volunteers registered in the database.

Now in its seventh year, RM has nearly 4,400 researchers with 485 open studies and over 106,000 volunteers registered. Those volunteers come from every state in the US and are nearly as ethnically and racially diverse as the general US population, though some groups are significantly under-represented and women far outnumber men.  

For a clinical researcher, RM can increase the chances of identifying enough volunteers that meet study inclusion criteria with sufficient diversity and without confounding geographical issues. Meanwhile, RM offers volunteers the opportunity to participate in clinical studies relevant to their own health and that of their community.

For RM to continue to be effective, more volunteers need to join the database and researchers need to register more studies. Since we last highlighted RM on this blog a few months ago, the RM volunteer pool has grown by over 6,000 and continues to grow every day. The more the database grows, the more connections can be made.

The UR CTSI is proud to be one of 133 institutions that participate in the RM network and to have helped spread the word about this excellent clinical recruitment tool during the social media campaign.  Winning that campaign competition means we will have more resources to educate researchers and the public about how ResearchMatch.org – and our local clinical study and volunteer databases – help connect researchers and study participants. Hopefully those efforts will foster that pattern of growth.

 

Michael Hazard | 11/30/2016

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