Impact of COVID-19 on Public Research Recruitment

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic created a major challenge for clinical trials recruitment as early attention was focused on matters of public health and clinical care, and research--outside of COVID-19-- essentially shut down. Rally with Partners (<ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://rally.partners.org">rally.partners.org</ext-link>), an Internet-based portal for clinical research volunteer recruitment, continued to support studies that continued their recruitment during this period and additionally, implemented several measures to support COVID-19 research. In this paper, we summarize our experiences and preliminary results.