4.1. Literacy and Clinical Trials
Awareness and knowledge about clinical trials are considered primary drivers of clinical trial participation. Our study presents innovative approaches for disseminating educational materials and enhancing clinical trial literacy. These approaches differ from previous strategies, which typically adopt a broad, text-heavy, and jargon-laden format, limiting accessibility to specific learning styles and modes of reasoning, lacking engagement, and failing to offer interactive experiences for individuals to explore and understand clinical trials. We contend that enhancing clinical trial literacy is an evolving process that requires the utilization of emerging technologies like AI-powered personalized newsfeeds. These newsfeeds continually adapt to individuals’ preferences, adjusting factors such as message timing, frequency, and media type (e.g., animation or web articles) to ensure exposure to content that resonates with them. Findings from our current study indicate that participants in the PREDHiCT intervention arm had higher levels of clinical trial literacy and greater improvement in literacy compared to the control group at the end of the study. In fact, exposing individuals to pamphlets about clinical trials, as was the case in the control group, lowered literacy levels by the end of the study. Although it is unclear what contributed to this decrease, we conjecture that it is likely that participants in the control group were seeking inaccurate information about clinical trials and thus may have a flawed view of clinical trials. This highlights the need to have a well-curated and trusted platform to disseminate information about clinical trials. 