Nonrespondents

were followed up with a series of postcard reminders, second questionnaires, and telephone interviews, as outlined in Fig. 1. Women who responded will be resurveyed annually for the next 4 years. In addition to repeating questions about medications, quality of life, and functional status, the follow-up surveys will include questions about persistence with medication, reasons for nonadherence, and detail about fracture-associated treatment. Fig. 1 Recruitment/enrollment flow chart. Asterisk, age-stratified sampling not feasible in Sydney, Paris, or Lyon Patient identity is safeguarded by the local study coordinator, who assigns an ID number to each participant at enrollment and maintains the site’s participant list locally. The names of patients are stored separately from BVD-523 study data transmitted to the central coordinating center (Center for Outcomes Research at the University of Massachusetts Medical School). Thus, unique patient identifiers are confidential to the investigators at each study site. The process for entering, verifying, and managing survey data is uniform across all study sites. Completed questionnaires are sent to the central

coordinating center, where they are scanned electronically, selleck inhibitor and data fields are audited visually by a person trained to process the forms. The data entry software is designed to detect out-of-range values, inconsistencies, and omissions and to document any resolutions. Scanned data are entered into a database stored

on a secured password-protected computer. As a quality control measure, each study site maintains an administrative database that tracks surveys mailed and received, and scanned surveys are checked against these databases. Twice yearly meetings are held with study coordinators from each of the study sites to review survey administration and ensure uniformity of the process. For study sites using telephone follow-up in addition to mail, a standard telephone script is used and reviewed with each site to ensure consistency of telephone survey administration. Results A total of 723 physicians agreed to participate in the GLOW study and supplied practice lists. The number of physicians ranged from 14 to 72 per site (median 40). In the US, 298 participating filipin physicians comprised 103 family physicians and 195 internal medicine physicians. All Canadian, Australian, and European participants were general practitioners. Baseline surveys were mailed between October 2006 and February 2008 to 140,416 potential subjects (Fig. 1). After the exclusion of 3,265 patients who were either ineligible or had died, 60,393 women agreed to participate. The median response rate among the 17 study sites was 62% (range 15–75); 76% of the study sites had a response rate of 50% or greater. Two sites experienced notably lower response rates than were typical.