Prescreening clinical trial volunteers using an online personality questionnaire

Abstract

Background

The cost of a clinical trial is affected by the efficiency of participant recruitment. It would be desirable to create a prescreening method that identifies appropriate candidates for full screening, in order to prevent inconvenience for both trial and volunteers. This study presents an online prescreening tool for this purpose.

Methods

In order to facilitate recruitment of 24 individuals meeting the criteria for generalized anxiety disorder to a pharmacological functional magnetic resonance imaging trial, we created an online personality questionnaire that generated a personality profile for each respondent and screened for the trial’s basic criteria.

Results

Our online platform screened 6,293 people for anxious personality traits in 1 year. A total of 862 eligible individuals were identified through this route, each of whom automatically received an email invitation to contact the study team for further telephone screening, if interested. Of those, 266 individuals contacted the team and 173 were telephone screened, with 53 attending the study site for medical checks. Twenty-eight individuals were fully eligible, and 24 completed the trial. This permitted completion on time and on budget.

Conclusion

Our online prescreening personality questionnaire platform did not remove the need for telephone screening or onsite medical checks, but increased the efficiency of recruitment through noninvasive identification of those meeting key requirements. Thus, our platform is a useful recruitment technique for clinical trials and is time-saving for both the trial and potential participants.

Keywords:

• recruitment
• prescreening
• personality
• mental health
• clinical trials

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge and thank Bionomics Ltd. Without their grant, the study could not have been resourced.

Disclosure

Allan H Young and Adam M Perkins were the named principal investigators who were awarded the grant from Bionomics Ltd, which supported this work. Allan H Young, Steven C R Williams, and Adam M Perkins were supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Health Service (NHS), National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Medical Research Council (MRC), or Department of Health. Fiona Patrick has been supported throughout her PhD by departmental funding within the Centre for Affective Disorders, Department of Psychological Medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. The authors report no other conflicts of interest in this work.