Design of a Cluster-Randomized Minority Recruitment Trial: RECRUIT

Many strategies to increase racial/ethnic minority recruitment focus on common diseases such as hypertension, while relatively few focus on less common conditions, often conducted in specialty clinics and dependent on physician referrals. This article presents the design of RECRUIT (Randomized Recruitment Intervention Trial), a national, randomized trial that examined the effectiveness of a trust-based continuous quality improvement intervention to increase minority recruitment into clinical trials. RECRUIT's innovations included its focus on building trust between specialist investigators and minority-serving physicians, the use of continuous quality improvement to tailor the intervention to each specialty clinic's specific racial/ethnic populations and barriers to minority recruitment, and the use of specialty clinics from more than one parent multi-site trial to increase generalizability.

Tilley BC, Mainous AG 3rd, Smith DW, et al. Design of a cluster-randomized minority recruitment trial: RECRUIT. Clinical Trials 2017;14(3):286-298.