Improving response rates among doctors: randomised trial: Table 1

Abstract

Institutional review boards often require the consent of a patient's doctor before a patient can be included in research studies. The process of obtaining consent can be long and costly, and excluding patients when consent cannot be obtained could limit the generalisability of results. We examined strategies (over which investigators might have control) to increase the response rate of doctors asked to provide consent to contact their patients. We identified the doctors of patients with cancer who were being asked to participate in a population based case-control study. These doctors were randomly assigned to one of eight treatments within two groups (affiliation with teaching hospital or non-teaching hospital). The eight treatments were combinations of signatory of the request letter (MD v PhD), letterhead (university v cancer agency), and presence or absence of a handwritten note thanking the doctor for …