2.3. Recruitment
death
DISEASE, RECRUITMENT, EVENT
The recruitment of healthcare professional, patients and caregivers will last 7 months. Healthcare professionals will be recruited during the first 4 months by each pilot site using a convenience sampling based on their individual profiles. The healthcare professionals will be contacted via email, letter, or face-to-face meeting to provide them with initial information about the ADLIFE intervention. Healthcare professionals consenting to participate will be recruited.Once healthcare professionals have been recruited and trained in the use of the ADLIFE intervention, each pilot site will identify a tentative target patient population fulfilling the eligibility criteria from EHR. After a validation process conducted by the healthcare professionals, a final target population will be defined.The intervention and control group will be recruited from the final target population during the last 2 months. Candidates for the intervention group will be recruited by healthcare professionals or research assistants according to the inclusion/exclusion criteria. They will be contacted by email, post, phone, or face-to-face meetings, and provided with information describing the ADLIFE intervention, their expected role, and their required ICT skills. Patients participating in the intervention will sign an informed consent and will receive ADLIFE intervention training.Patients in the intervention group may appoint an informal caregiver who will participate with them in ADLIFE in order to assist them with ICT management and self-management empowerment of their disease. Informal caregivers will sign an informed consent to participate in the intervention, and a second informed consent to access their corresponding patient’s data. They will receive ADLIFE training together with the corresponding recruited patient they care for.In the event of a participant’s drop-out of the project, their previously collected data will be retained, unless otherwise stated, and analyzed under the intention-to-treat principle. Drop-out reasons will be defined as: (i) death, (ii) not interested in the intervention anymore, (iii) too time-consuming, (iv) technology issues, (v) declaring lack of help from their informal caregiver, (vi) institutionalization, which implies a change of healthcare professional, and (vii) no response. In the case of healthcare professionals, any position change will also be considered as drop-out reason. Informal caregivers will automatically drop-out of the project if their patients do so.After removing the intervention patients from the final target population, a target control population will be identified. Control group patients will be retrospectively selected based on the afore-mentioned matching techniques (see 