Table 1.

Comparisons of Recruitment Effort and Process by Study Staff and Estimated Time Between the Approach Using TESRS and the Standard Mailing Approach.

Recruitment effort under the traditional mailing approach	Estimated time spent per patient	Recruitment effort under TESRS	Estimated time spent per patient
Organize and send recruitment list to Media Service Team a who verifies the list and sends out invitation letter via traditional postal mail	Done once per batch	Saves recruitment list to a network share for dissemination to study support systems to send invitations (most invites go out electronically, some mailed by Media Service Team)	Done once per batch
When mail arrives, open and sort	5 min	When mail arrives, open and sort (only for those who prefer mail contact)	2-3 min
Coordinator calls patient to pre-screen, inclusion/exclusion	15 min	Automatic (self-prescreening)	N/A
Data entry	10 min	Data entry (only for those who prefer mail contact) b	2-3 min
Onsite consent process	15 min	Automatic (self-consenting)	N/A
Once consent is received, everything will be the same after this point
Total	45 min		5 min

^aSome institutions may not have this service, so individual investigative team may need to put together all materials to be sent out to eligible subjects, which will add another layer of coordinators’ time.

^bFor the individuals that signed consent electronically (TESRS), the data were electronically imported to REDCap by our statistics team. This was set up as an automatic process and ran every night. The manual data entry would be needed for those that did not prefer electronic consent.