Blog

Ruth Gebrezghi
July 14, 2022
EHR Recruitment
Office Hours
Recruitment
Remote Recruitment

Office Hours: EHR Recruitment

Office Hours with the Participant Recruitment Program is officially back! These are online zoom session where you can drop by and ask questions about recruitment, learn more about recruitment services provided by our program, and access free resources designed to help you reach your recruitment goals.

Who Should Attend?

Open to anyone in the UCSF community and especially helpful for those involved in research recruitment. Our last session was on our EHR Recruitment Service. You can find a recording of this session here:

 EHR Recruitment Office Hours Recording 

A few of the questions asked in this session:

How specific can patients be filtered using EHR recruitment?

  • We generally recommend that studies think broadly about their EHR recruitment search criteria. Study teams can however be specific (diagnosis codes, lab values, smart data elements, etc.) or broad (age, gender, etc.) with their inclusion criteria for EHR recruitment. To learn more, please click here to schedule a free consultation with our team.

I’m not sure if my study is a good fit for EHR recruitment, who should I speak to, to learn more?

  • EHR recruitment is best suited for studies looking to recruit within the UCSF Health network that have inclusion/...
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Molly Belinski
June 8, 2022
Communication
Flyers
Recruitment
Remote Recruitment

Three reasons to create a UCSF study email address

Why create a UCSF.edu study email address?

1. Easy to use: A study email address is likely easier for participants to remember and less prone to typos than a personal email address.

2. Establish trust: A UCSF.edu email address signals to potential participants that your study is part of UCSF-- a trusted institution.

3. Streamline communications: Once you have a study email address, you can give multiple team members access and centralize all study communications from that mailbox. This is helpful if a study team member is out of office and a colleague needs to cover duties.

It's easy to create a UCSF email address for your study--here's how:

1. Follow this link: https://ucsf.service-now.com/ess/order_accounts.do

2. Select the third menu item "ARF: Active Directory Resource Account Request (Campus only)"

3. Fill out the form--this part should be self-explanatory. You will need to specify the owner of the account, account name and email address, and then select "resource account type: Mailbox Entity"

Molly Belinski
June 8, 2022
Communication
Flyers
Recruitment
Remote Recruitment

Create beautiful links (and QR codes!) with tiny.ucsf.edu

Did you know that UCSF has its very own URL shortener? Tiny.ucsf.edu allows users to convert a long URL into something much shorter and easier to type. You can create customized links (eg, tiny.ucsf.edu/studyname or generate randomly generated urls. These are especially great for shortening long REDCap or Qualtrics links to include in advertising materials. Tiny.ucsf.edu will also create a QR code for you. You can save the image file for the QR code and add it to your ads.

 

As a bonus,  you can easily track how many people use your new Tiny.ucsf.edu link. Just add "*" to the end of your tiny URL and you'll get some basic stats about your link. This is great for understanding some basic analytics, as you can quickly create customized links for each recruitment method/outreach audience to track engagement.

 

Molly Belinski
April 3, 2020
Communication
Recruitment
Remote Recruitment

6 Tips for Creating an Online Screener That Works

To help study teams create high-quality pre-screeners, we’ve gathered a few tips on how to make effective forms that are easy for participants to fill out.
Molly Belinski
April 2, 2020
Communication
Recruitment
Remote Recruitment

My favorite shortcut for scheduling Zoom meetings

There are a few different ways to go about setting up a Zoom meeting—I think I’ve tried them all and I have come up with my own system that I think is the fastest. I thought this tip might be useful for other people as we increasingly rely on Zoom to communicate with our colleagues and study participants. My method uses the Zoom Personal Room feature combined with Outlook’s “Quick Parts” feature.
Tiffany Lee, MPH, MS
July 10, 2019
Clinic recruitment
Communication
Recruitment

Lessons from Clinic Recruitment: Sensitive Diagnosis

Recruiting patients can be intimidating ---and a cold approach in a clinic is even more daunting. I’d like to share a few trial-by-fire tips I learned while recruiting for several maternal fetal medicine studies here at UCSF.
Tiffany Lee, MPH, MS
July 5, 2019
Flyers
Recruitment
ZSFG

How to Reach Your Participants at ZSFG with Flyers

There are several good reasons why studies might recruit at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. One: Your study is based at ZSFG. There is no better way place to find participants for the study than the research site. From my experience as a ZSFG CRC, patients and staff who are familiar with the facility have better compliance/follow-up attendance rate. Two: Your study is not based at ZSFG—but you’re interested in diversifying your patient population pool. Either way, flyering is a solid method to start meeting such participants. Here’s how!
March 21, 2019
Recruitment

Tips for preparing a clinical research recruitment budget

By Ann Chang, Associate Director, UCSF Women’s Health Clinical Research Center

More often than not, clinical research teams underestimate the staff effort and financial resources needed to reach enrollment targets. Building in sufficient recruitment funds in the grant budget is essential to recruitment success. Here are a few things to consider when preparing your budget…

1.  Study population: Is the pool of eligible participants large or limited?

  • If the participant population is fairly large, you may want to consider the more broad recruitment approach, such as placing newspaper ads, general mailings to the community, or social media advertising campaigns. Recruitment campaigns can be costly, so budget accordingly.  This handy tip sheet provides a list of tactics and cost guidance.
  • If the participant population is highly targeted, you may want to consider budgeting for:
    • More staff time to conduct chart review, clinic recruitment, and outreach to condition specific support/advocacy groups
    • A cohort identification mailing, which takes into account how many letters you will need to mail to achieve recruitment goals

2.  Recruitment timeline: How long do you have to reach your recruitment goal?

  • If your recruitment timeline is ambitious, consider increasing recruitment funds and/or staffing to allow an aggressive recruitment campaign
  • If your recruitment timeline spans...
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