Center for Identification and Study of Individuals with Atypical Diabetes Mellitus

The Rare and Atypical Diabetes Network (RADIANT) aims to 1) to identify patients and families with novel rare and atypical forms of diabetes and characterize the underlying molecular mechanisms, including a focus on outreach , 2) to perform genetic and phenotypic characterization of these participants, 3) to construct an access-controlled biorepository and database, and 4) to make data and biosamples available to the scientific community to advance research in this area. Successful enrollment of participants from the entire potential research community has been a focus of RADIANT since it opened to enrollment in 2020. RADIANT has continued to make progress towards meeting these goals, but there are still opportunities to improve. The RADIANT study has employed several methods to increase recruitment and retention of the entire eligible population. Strategies that have shown the best promise utilize community health workers or participant navigators to address barriers such as mistrust or incomplete understanding of the study as well as practical solutions to logistical barriers to participation. The key challenge across all sites has been having sufficient staff financial support to provide these time-consuming services necessary to appropriately engage and support all populations. In this supplement, we propose hiring a coordinator to help enhance recruitment and retention of all populations in Chicago. Increased recruitment and retention efforts in the Chicago community will increase the overall engagement of participants in RADIANT. We anticipate the study coordinator will glean new insights into facilitators and barriers to study enrollment and retention that will be shared study-wide to further extend the impact of this supplement.