Abstract
Purpose :
Few studies have examined the combination of vision, hearing, and balance loss in older adults. We examined two strategies of recruiting community-dwelling adults 80 and older. We compared enrolled and non-enrolled participants' demographics for both recruitment strategies.
Methods :
The 80 years and Older Very Important Persons Project (80VIP) used a consumer database of telephone numbers, real estate taxes, voter registration, and utility bills (Data Axle USA®, Dallas, TX), or an electronic health record (Legacy Health (Portland, OR) and Epic (Epic Systems, Verona, WI)) to select households likely to have a member 80 years or older from the metropolitan area of Portland, Oregon. We had a target enrollment of 40 persons and recruited participants by mail and telephone. A door-to-door visit was performed if no response by mail or telephone was received. We compared the two recruitment strategies (Daxa Axle vs. Epic) with regard to enrollment of eligible persons by age, gender, race, and history of diabetes and hypertension.
Results :
The consumer database and the electronic health record (EHR) included 121/368 (36%) and 10/16 (62%) eligible participants, respectively (p < 0.01). We were able to enroll 35/121 (28.9%) and 5/10 (50.0%) of the eligible participants from the consumer and the EHR database (p = 0.164). Of those eligible, age, gender, race, history of diabetes and hypertension did not significantly differ in those that were enrolled (n=40) vs. those that were not enrolled (n=91) (p > 0.05 for all) in both the consumer database and Epic. We initiated 74 door-to-door visits and completed 62, but this did not result in enrollment of a participant. Most (34/35, 97.1%) of the participants recruited by the consumer database were also located in the EHR database.
Conclusions :
We were able to successfully recruit community-dwelling adults 80 and older into a study examining vision, hearing, and balance loss. A database from an electronic health record may be a useful method to select eligible subjects and recruit participants in this age group. Community outreach did not increase the likelihood of subject participation in the study. We will report vision, hearing, and balance loss findings in the future.
This abstract was presented at the 2023 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in New Orleans, LA, April 23-27, 2023.