Projects

Recruiting Older Adults into Research (ROAR)

Developing new partnerships & messages to promote research participation among older adults.

Executive Summary

The ROAR project seeks to raise awareness and engagement about research participation among older adults:

  • Starting with Alzheimer’s research, as a common interest with an urgent need
  • Working through the aging services and public health networks – trusted intermediaries who have high touch with older adults and caregivers and may be interested in sharing this information, but need materials
  • Resulting in an expanded pool of older adults who are willing to participate in studies and trials, who will help to accelerate scientific discovery.

Insufficient participant recruitment for research can delay or cause research study cancellation, a substantial waste of resources. The need for Alzheimer’s clinical research study participants is urgent: tens of thousands of volunteers are needed for research studies focused on delaying, treating or preventing this growing public health problem.

Through ROAR, three HHS agencies: The Administration for Community Living (ACL), the National Institutes for Health (NIH), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and their networks of state and community-based health and social service providers collaborated with researchers and private organizations to raise awareness, enhance knowledge and connect gatekeepers and older adults with easy, actionable opportunities for research participation.

The cross-agency team established partnerships with existing government-funded resources and registries such as ResearchMatch, a free, national recruitment registry funded in part by NIH; the Alzheimer’s Prevention Registry; and the Alzheimer’s Assocation’s TrialMatch service. The goal of the ROAR project is to significantly increase older adult enrollment in these registries, allowing for more targeted invitations to enroll in current and future research studies.

The HHS Ignite project resulted in:

  • A robust, flexible, scalable outreach plan which will guide the team’s work together in the months to come;
  • A set of draft materials that have been initially reviewed by stakeholders and are ready for pilot testing;
  • A partnership with ResearchMatch to promote an easy action step for our audience with a unique URL (www.ResearchMatch.org/ROAR) that will allow us to track and measure the success of our efforts, as well as promoting other Alzheimer’s specific registries; and
  • Momentum and interest on the part of external organizations to join the ROAR effort.

The materials created, partnership formed and lessons learned from this effort can be expanded to include research for other conditions that impact older adults. This project builds on the success of an HHS Innovates award: Connecting to Combat Alzheimer’s which was a Secretary’s Pick and won the People’s Choice Award.

A project supported by the: HHS Ignite Accelerator

Team Members

Amy Wiatr-Rodriguez (Project Lead), ACL
Jennifer Watson, NIH
Nina Silverberg, NIH
Jane Tilly, ACL
Kate Gordon, ACL
Hunter McKay, ACL
Angela Deokar, CDC

Milestones

July 2013: Selected into the HHS Ignite Accelerator
August 2013: Time in the Accelerator began
February 2014: Time in the Accelerator ended

Project Sponsor

Aviva Sufian, Administration on Aging, ACL