Wright Center’s Innovative Study Recruitment Strategy Earns National Recognition
In early 2026, Virginia set a path to become one of the first states in the nation to restrict sugar-sweetened beverages from being purchased with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. While the policy aims to better align SNAP with its nutritional mission and enhance the nutrition of food available to families, it also creates a significant question for researchers: how will these changes affect the daily lives and dietary choices of food-insecure families?
To answer this question, Jennifer Lambert, M.D., M.H.S., an assistant professor in the VCU School of Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics, is leading a study titled “Sweetened Beverage Intake, Purchasing, and Perceptions Among SNAP Participating Families with Children in Virginia Before and After SNAP Sweetened Beverage Restrictions (SIPS)”. Lambert is mentored by Melanie Bean, Ph.D., professor in the VCU School of Medicine and lead of the Resources and Services core for the C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research. Together, the study team faced a critical hurdle: an immovable recruitment deadline tied to the original April 1 rollout of the policy and a massive enrollment goal.
To provide meaningful baseline data, the team sought to collect hundreds of baseline surveys in under one month. But researchers knew that reaching this target would require engaging thousands of families to screen for specific eligibility criteria: participants had to be SNAP users, have a child between the ages of 2 and 17, and speak either English or Spanish. Families were compensated for their time upon completing the survey, which represents the first phase of the study. The same participants will be surveyed again after the policy change goes into effect to track longitudinal shifts in purchasing habits.
An Informatics Success Story
Conventional outreach strategies, such as social media recruitment, often struggle with low verification rates, imposters, and “bots.” The study initially began by identifying known patients with children at Children’s Hospital of Richmond at VCU (CHoR) who used Medicaid. These families completed a prescreening process that included a high-integrity verification step: uploading a photo of their SNAP card showing only the last four digits.
To scale this high-integrity data collection to meet their ambitious goals, the SIPS team then turned to the Wright Center and VCU Health’s Enterprise Analytics to build a specialized informatics pipeline within VCU Health’s Epic electronic health record (EHR) system.
The workflow utilized the EHR not just as a static database, but as a dynamic research tool. Allison Newman, M.S., from the Wright Center’s informatics team, first identified a cohort of 10,700 patients. Shannon Bruffy, an applications analyst with VCU Health Enterprise Analytics, then loaded this cohort into a novel, study-specific Epic Slicer-Dicer model, creating a secure environment for restricted-access tracking.
Building on this foundation, Jennifer McFarland, a senior applications analyst with VCU Health, developed a custom reporting action to mark candidates within the system and configured a high-volume MyChart messaging infrastructure. By deploying automated messages to approximately 3,000 patients per day, the team saved an estimated 167 hours of manual staff labor—the equivalent of more than four weeks of full-time work.
This efficiency allowed the study to launch and begin collecting baseline data well ahead of the anticipated spring policy shift. While the implementation timeline for the restrictions has since proven dynamic—officials announced on March 31 that the start date would be pushed back from April 1 to October 1—the study team’s rapid-response informatics work remained essential to capturing the “before” state of family purchasing habits.
The team’s efforts proved highly successful, resulting in the collection of over 300 baseline surveys during the month of March. “This recruitment approach yielded no bot-generated responses, which is a rare feat in incentivized survey research,” said Lambert.
The “Gold Star” Standard
While the primary goal was learning about how the new policy would affect Virginia families, the project’s technical rigor caught the attention of national evaluators. The innovative use of the Slicer-Dicer model and Epic MyChart for recruitment directly contributed to VCU Health securing its eighth research “gold star” from Epic Systems.
“The Epic Gold Stars program is a 10-level rating system that ranks how effectively health systems use their software,” said Mary Harmon, Ph.D., director of clinical research at VCU Health. “For research, there are only 10 possible stars, and this project earned us our eighth—representing top-tier, optimized, and leading practices.”
The achievement highlights VCU Health and the Wright Center’s commitment to using the fullest capabilities of the EHR to advance health research. By utilizing the secure MyChart portal, researchers could verify participants with high confidence, ensuring that the study’s findings on child nutrition and food policy are based on verified, local data.
Ultimately, the SIPS project serves as a new model for how informatics can bridge the gap between high-level public health policy and direct patient engagement, ensuring that the health system remains a leader in both technology and community care.
About the VCU Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research
The C. Kenneth and Dianne Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research is supported by a seven-year, $27.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, the largest NIH award in VCU history. This award, through the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, integrates the Wright Center with a national network of over 60 research institutions that are working to accelerate the transformation of laboratory discoveries into treatments for patients, engage communities in clinical research and train a new generation of clinical and translational scholars.
Renewed in 2023, the center is a primary engine for translational science in our region. As the administrative home of the Wright Regional Center for Clinical and Translational Science (Wright Regional CCTS), the center coordinates a powerful central and southeastern Virginia collaboration between VCU, Virginia State University (VSU), Old Dominion University (ODU), and Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS), serving as a vital hub for translational science in the region.
Categories Clinical Research, Collaboration, Research, Resources and Services