The Social Heart Study isn’t the only research effort to use social networking as a tool to drive enrollment, but it’s among the first to also incorporate Social Media into the research itself.
“Social networking offers new ways for researchers to think about recruiting and retaining study subjects,” says Mark Pletcher, MD, MPH, the UCSF researcher leading the Social Heart Study. “In this case, we’re using online social networks to recruit subjects for our cardiovascular health study, and also exploring the role that social networking itself may play in cardiovascular health.”
The study is now actively recruiting participants, and is open to any adult with a valid email address. Recruitment results from the first two weeks of the study appear promising, says Pletcher, with hundreds of people already enrolled and an 80% study completion rate.
The study, a collaborative effort between the San Francisco and San Diego campuses of the University of California, includes three planned phases. The first, currently underway, gives participants tools to estimate risk for heart attacks, and will help determine how social networks contribute to cardiovascular health. Phases II and III will enable other social network features, such as allowing participants to see how their health compares to others in their network, and enroll participants in prevention research studies.
“Social Media allows people to be more engaged in the research process while also playing a more active role in monitoring their risk factors and maintaining their health,” says Nariman Nasser, director of the UCSF Participant Recruitment Service (PRS). “And the more quickly we can recruit participants, particularly in large population studies like this one, the better the opportunities for researchers to produce findings that will inform and improve medical care.”
The PRS, which provides a suite of services to support participant recruitment at UCSF, is a project of the Clinical Research Services program of UCSF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI).
More information about the Social Heart Study, including an invitation to join and tools to share and connect to the study using social media, is available at https://socialheartstudy.org/.