The Participant Recruitment and Management Core, consisting of a full-time Coordinator and a parttimeresearch assistant and guided by the Core Director, was designed from the ground up to provideservices to assist center investigators in the following ways: (1) The identification and recruitment ofparticipants, (2) Management of contacts with participants in existing studies, and (3) Provide trainingin human subjects and act as a liaison between investigators, the local institutional review board (IRB)and human subject consortiums. PARC has established the necessary infrastructure to meet these aims.Specifically, PARC has designed a number of databases geared towards targeting households forrecruitment and keeping track of individuals' participation in Center projects, as well as a database ofregional organizations that can assist in participant recruitment either as recruitment sites or asresources for targeting likely participants. PARC also assists Center investigators' recruitment effortsby providing demography services to target specific geographical areas that would result in moreefficient recruiting. Furthermore, PARC maintains regular contact with past participants throughregular newsletter and birthday card mailings, and is able to employ a number of tracking methods tofind 'lost' households, thus maximizing participant retention. Finally, the Core brings together Centerinvestigators and staff for workshops on current participant targeting and recruitment strategies andthe latest developments in human subject policies. These specialized services are often not fundablethrough R01 mechanisms and are not provided elsewhere. For the future, the Core plans to expand itscurrent aims outlined above to include: 1) Greater integration with the Digital and ElectricalEngineering and Analytic Techniques and Technology Cores of the Center, 2) Improved investigatoraccess to PARC resources and services, 3) Contributions to the scholarship of participant recruitmentand retention, and 4) Tailoring of PARC services to clinical trials/translational research.
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