As a researcher, you spend a lot of time recruiting participants for your study. And when you’ve gathered people’s interest, you often have to tell them no during prescreening. Getting to the actual inclusion of a new participant can be an arduous and frustrating process, which keeps you from what you want to do: conducting your study and collecting data. This is where Hersenonderzoek.nl helps.

How does it work?

Hersenonderzoek.nl manages a register that holds over 20.000 people. They have signed up in the knowledge that they can be invited for all kinds of brain research. They have provided us with information about their medical history, lifestyle, and demographics.

Based on this information, we can make a distinct selection and invite only those registrants that match the profile you’re looking for. This group of people receives an invitation by e-mail through which they are redirected to their personal page. Here, they read up on your study and let us know whether they are interested in participating.

If so, we make sure that you’re able to contact them and can jump to the last checks of your prescreening process. You are now in touch with people that a) match the profile you’re looking for, b) know quite a bit about the study already and c) have expressed their interest for participation.

Apply for help

If you’d like to use our help, please see this Dutch information page for researchers and send us your request. Why in Dutch? Because we find it important that the registrants are approached and informed in their own tongue. Being able to communicate in Dutch is, therefore, one of the requirements we ask of researchers. If you work with an international team and have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.

How it all began

Hersenonderzoek.nl is born out of the struggle that solution-oriented researchers of the Alzheimercentrum Amsterdam went through. We experienced first hand that research did not go as speedy as planned and pinpointed the laborious recruitment as one of the greatest bottlenecks. We set up a local registry which we upscaled nationally, after a successful pilot.

At that stage we got help from a similar initiative – the Brain Health Registry of the University of San Fransisco – which gave us a head start in rolling out the basis for the nationwide platform. Soon after, partners such as the Hersenstichting, Alzheimer Nederland, Gieskes Strijbis Fonds en ZonMw joined, which provided us financial and knowledge support for the start-up phase of the platform.

Our findings

We learned a lot in the past few years and are happy to share our findings. On this page, we will share the articles we plan to publish.