Present:

Preliminary Discussion (Retention Rates): Participants on the call started discussing retention rate as people are getting done with recruitment and getting into retention phase.  It seems that the follow-ups that are occurring close to the end of the intervention have lower retention rates than the follow-ups that are occurring further along.  This seemed to be even truer for sites with more intensive intervention.  For example, Lynn Burrell from Cornell is doing phone interventions every 3 months.  She said that people seemed to be feeling overwhelmed by the amount of calls that they are receiving in the beginning and the number of things they need to do.  As a way to resolve this retention issue the Cornell site decided to shorten the length of their phone intervention for some of the time points.  That is, at baseline, 1-year, and 2-year points they are doing the long intervention (40 mins).  However, in between, i.e., at 3, 6, 9, 15, and 18 months, they are doing a 25 minutes intervention only.  This seemed to have helped their retention rate.

• University of Rochester: Chantal Levesque reported that they have just completed their recruitment.  They now have 1000+ participants.  The efforts are now focused on retention, especially at 6 months.

• Cornell University: As mentioned already, Lynn Burrell reported a change in their phone procedure.  They shorten some of the calls to 25 minutes to try to increase their retention rate.   Their 6-month data point is a little low but its getting better.  Lynn also reported that they have 100 participants gone through the 2-year point.

• University of Michigan / Henry Ford: Lucy Robinson reported that they are now doing much better with their recruitment effort.  They now have 1500 participants in the study.  Their goal is to recruit 3600 participants.  So they are about half way through.   Approximately 500 of their participants are through the 3-month point and some participants are now reaching the 1-year follow-up.  They are now able to recruit much faster because they modified their entry criteria.  It seems that potential participants were over reporting the number of hours of exercise they were doing each week, so they were never qualifying as having this particular risk factor for exercise.   Instead of being 4 hours a week, the cutoff is now 6 hours a week.  Lucy also reported that they found that the best time to reach people was in the evening and they are now focusing on this time period so they get more effective.

• University of Tennessee: Mace Coday reported that things are going well.  They are done with the 6-month time point (84% completed).  Their intervention is an in-clinic intervention but for some participants, they had to do a phone visit because they could not get these people otherwise.  At 12-month, Mace reported a 98% compliance rate.  74% of the participants are through the 12-month point.  About 90 participants are ready to complete the 24-month time point.  Mace reported that they are now much better at getting people in their window on time.  She also reported that spreading out the time points seemed to help so that people are not feeling overwhelmed by the intervention.

• OHSU (PHLAME): Sara Dolen reported that they have just finished the 12-month time point.  Approximately 82% of the people completed this time point.  They will begin their 24-month testing in October.

• University of Rhode Island: Sandy Saunders reported that their baseline is finished.  They recruited 1300 participants.  The 12-month data point is half way completed; 600 people have been through 12-month.  Sandy reported a retention rate of 87%-90%.  Their intervention is done in the participant’s home or in the Center.  Participants are actually given the choice.  Most people choose to have an interviewer actually come to their home.  Sandy said that although time consuming, this is what they were set up to do, so it works well.  They are planning to finish the 12-month in August.   She said they will begin their 24-month in September.

• Stanford (CHAT): Cynthia Castro reported by e-mail they have randomized 213 to date, with a final 9 RZ appointments scheduled for next month.  Retention rates: 9 participants have dropped, so retention is 96%.

As for the Results section, Mace noticed that on p.9 of the paper, bottom of the page, we mention that we asked each site to subjectively rank order the different strategies they used to help with recruitment and retention (Solution-oriented process to guide problem-solving experience).  In fact we did not do that.  As it is now, we have the number of sites that used different strategies since we answered “yes” “no” questions about each strategy.  So the group agreed that it would add to the paper to actually ask people to rank order their problem-solving strategies.  Mace will ask Jennifer to re-send the surveys in another e-mail and ask representative of each site to do this rank ordering of the strategies.

In addition, in this e-mail, representatives will be asked to provide a time line as to when each of the follow up time points would be completed, their retention rate at each time point (if know), and the total sample size targeted.

Finally, the group discussed the things that could be done at the next BCC meeting.  The paper will be the focused on the next BCC meeting for the recruitment and retention group.  Mace proposed a time line.  By the time of the BCC, the introduction would be done as well as most of the results if people respond quickly to the e-mail request that Jennifer will send.  Mace mentioned that people were really good about replying to the last survey request.  Thank you.  So the plan for the BCC meeting would be to work on a draft of the results and discussion of the paper.  Mace said that she would write the discussion once the results section was completed.  As something to think about, Mace suggested that maybe adding the first table that went out (the big tables with all site summaries; one for recruitment and one for retention) to the paper could be a good idea.

Mace said that she would e-mail people 3 choices of dates for the next conference call.  It will most likely be on a Wednesday.  We are thus planning one more call before the BCC meeting in July.