Sommers Jonathan, Dizon Don S, Lewis Mark A, Stone Erik, Andreoli Richard, Henderson Vida
Digital Health Networks, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
Brown University, Providence, RI, United States.
JMIR Cancer. 2025 Mar 3;11:e56098. doi: 10.2196/56098.
The lack of information and awareness about clinical trials, as well as misconceptions about them, are major barriers to cancer clinical trial participation. Digital and social media are dominant sources of health information and offer optimal opportunities to improve public medical awareness and education by providing accurate and trustworthy health information from reliable sources. Infotainment, material intended to both entertain and inform, is an effective strategy for engaging and educating audiences that can be easily disseminated using social media and may be a novel way to improve awareness of and recruitment in clinical trials.
The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether an infotainment video promoting a clinical trial, disseminated using social media, could drive health information seeking behaviors.
As part of a video series, we created an infotainment video focused on the promotion of a specific cancer clinical trial. We instituted a dissemination and marketing process on Facebook to measure video engagement and health information seeking behaviors among targeted audiences who expressed interest in breast cancer research and organizations. To evaluate video engagement, we measured reach, retention, outbound clicks, and outbound click-through rate. Frequencies and descriptive statistics were used to summarize each measure.
The video substantially increased health information seeking behavior by increasing viewership from 1 visitor one month prior to launch to 414 outbound clicks from the video to the clinical trial web page during the 21-day social media campaign period.
Our study shows that digital and social media tools can be tailored for specific target audiences, are scalable, and can be disseminated at low cost, making it an accessible educational, recruitment, and retention strategy focused on improving the awareness of clinical trials.
缺乏关于临床试验的信息和认知，以及对临床试验的误解，是癌症临床试验参与率低的主要障碍。数字媒体和社交媒体是健康信息的主要来源，通过提供来自可靠来源的准确且值得信赖的健康信息，为提高公众医学认知和教育提供了绝佳机会。信息娱乐内容，即兼具娱乐性和信息性的材料，是吸引和教育受众的有效策略，可通过社交媒体轻松传播，可能是提高临床试验认知度和招募率的一种新方法。
本研究旨在评估通过社交媒体传播的宣传临床试验的信息娱乐视频是否能推动健康信息搜索行为。
作为一系列视频的一部分，我们制作了一个聚焦于推广特定癌症临床试验的信息娱乐视频。我们在脸书上开展了传播和营销流程，以衡量目标受众（对乳腺癌研究及相关组织感兴趣的人群）中的视频参与度和健康信息搜索行为。为评估视频参与度，我们测量了覆盖面、留存率、出站点击量和出站点击率。使用频率和描述性统计来总结各项指标。
在为期21天的社交媒体宣传活动期间，该视频显著增加了健康信息搜索行为，观看量从发布前一个月的1位访客增加到视频到临床试验网页的414次出站点击量。
我们的研究表明，数字媒体和社交媒体工具可针对特定目标受众进行定制，具有可扩展性，且能低成本传播，使其成为一种易于实施的教育、招募和留存策略，专注于提高对临床试验的认知度。
