What if a simple email could help primary care clinics better understand patients’ experiences?

ameliefournier4
3 hours ago
1 min read

New article from our team in JMIR Human Factors

What if a simple email could help primary care clinics better understand patients’ experiences?

In a context where clinical teams are already highly stretched, recruiting patients for primary care research is often challenging. As part of the large-scale PaRIS Survey, we explored a simple, low-burden approach that aligns well with today’s realities: email recruitment.

More than 14,000 patients across 12 primary care clinics in Quebec received an invitation to complete an online questionnaire. The invitation included an engaging informational visual created by a scientific graphic designer and a short explanatory video about the project presented by a patient partner. The invitation was sent by the clinics using the Quebec-based email marketing platform CyberImpact.

The results are encouraging: nearly three out of four emails were opened, and about 10% of invited patients completed the questionnaire. Reminder messages played a key role, generating two-thirds of the responses.

These findings suggest that digital strategies can be effective tools for reaching patients and supporting primary care research while limiting the recruitment and data-collection burden on clinical teams.