Core E: Recruitment Core

PROJECT SUMMARY – OUTREACH RECRUITMENT AND ENGAGEMENT CORE (CORE E) The UCI ADRC Outreach Recruitment and Engagement (ORE) Core bridges the activities of the ADRC to the local community and ensures the successful accrual and retention of participants to ADRC studies. The ORE Core performs outreach to ensure the awareness of the local community of the need for partnership in the form of advocacy and participation in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and AD-Related Disorders (ADRD) clinical research. This outreach includes traditional public education by ORE Core and other ADRC faculty and staff, as well as innovative electronic outreach through the ADRC website and social media platforms. The efforts of the core are multimodal, multilingual, and evidence-based and particularly focus on Asian American and Hispanic communities, disadvantaged neighborhoods, and families and individuals with Down syndrome. The ORE Core, in partnership with the Clinical and Data Management and Statistical Cores maintains the Consent-to-Contact (C2C) Registry, an efficient tool to quantify the effectiveness of outreach efforts and to support study recruitment in the ADRC as well as to other studies at UCI. The C2C Registry now includes more than 6000 individuals who have provided extensive demographic, clinical, and lifestyle data that enable prioritized recruitment of individuals most likely to qualify for studies. More than 1000 participants have been enrolled in studies through this tool. The ORE performs numerous interventions to retain participants in the ADRC Clinical Core and other longitudinal studies. In the ADRC, retention rates are very high (e.g., F1= 87%; F2=83%; F3=84% in the Clinical Core). The ORE Core performs innovative research into the science of recruitment with the goal of generating evidence to improve practices in recruitment and retention at UCI and beyond. Finally, the ORE Core is actively involved in the training mission of the ADRC, maintaining a variety of programs targeting the earliest stage investigators (e.g., high school and undergraduate trainees) and actively participating the ADRC Research Education Component.