Broadly speaking that means supporting organisations (usually NHS trusts) to recruit patients into clinical trials and studies.
We have an aim to help the sponsors of this research (usually universities or commercial companies) to recruit the patients they need, on time and to target.
Traditionally, we do this by investing our resources in research nurses and the infrastructure they need to support their work.
Recently, the Clinical Research Network: Yorkshire and Humber has pioneered a new approach, which enables patients to refer themselves into research.
How We Usually Work
How do we find the patients we need to recruit into trials? There are a few tried and tested methods:
• We recruit them in hospital clinics. This works really well for clinical trials, which often have a set of clinical inclusion and exclusion criteria. By targeting, say, a diabetes foot clinic, we will find people a diabetic foot trial.
• We recruit them in GP surgeries. This works really well for clinical research in the general population. For example, if you want to research a new flu vaccine in the over 75s, you can be sure they'll be on a GP's list and likely to have an upcoming appointment.
• We use database searches to find eligible patients, then we write to them and invite them to contact us. This works really well for new treatments related to long-term conditions.
All of these methods are effective, but they are also slow and expensive.
How Social Media Marketing Works
Social media marketing works by using the information we volunteer to sites like Facebook. Without doing it consciously, we tell these websites a great deal about our lives. We tell them what sports we like. We tell them what we music we like. We tell them what hobbies we like. By tapping into this information, companies can market all sorts of products to us. Crucially, they also know where I am, my age, my sex and, probably, whether or not I have diabetes.
So, using the same techniques used to advertise a sale you might be interested in, we can tell a diabetes patient who lives within 40 miles of Leeds that there is a new research study they might want to join.
Results in the Real World
Last year we worked with the team behind the ESMID (Evaluating Self-Management in Diabetes) study. As part of that work, they developed an online study and needed to recruit 700 patients with diabetes. Using traditional methods, they were able to recruit ~150 patients in around 4 weeks, but recruitment then slowed to just a few patients per day. By applying the techniques of social media marketing, we were able to recruit a further ~600 patients in only 4 days, closing the study on time and to target.
We have since used the same method to recruit thousands of patients to our research, cheaply and efficiently.
It is now a valuable research delivery tool.