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Accountable care organizations (ACOs) aim to provide care coordination, reduce disparities, and link with community-based services within capitated financing. Many ACOs have not yet incorporated mental health services into their provider networks. The present study aims to examine the effectiveness of an intervention provided by community health workers as mental health providers, thereby expanding ACO infrastructure and increasing access to and quality of mental healthcare for racial, ethnic, and linguistic minoritized populations in North Carolina and Massachusetts. The Strong Minds-Strong Communities Randomized Clinical Trial (RCT) focused on (1) increasing engagement in mental health care, (2) decreasing depression and anxiety symptoms, (3) improving functioning, and (4) increasing the perceived quality of care. Participants include Latinx, Asian, Black, and non-Latinx White adults 18 years old and above with moderate to severe depression or anxiety symptoms and fluent in English, Spanish, Mandarin, or Cantonese. Participants were assessed at four time points throughout the study: baseline and 3-, 6-, and 12-months post-baseline. The effectiveness of the intervention, including moderation by race and ethnicity and by site, will be evaluated using a between-subjects design comparing outcomes at each post-baseline assessment between intervention and control participants.

Recruitment and engagement of racial/ethnic minority older adults in clinical trials is crucial to expand implementation of evidence-based interventions for disability prevention. Public Health measures to counteract COVID-19 pandemic have increased the challenges on reaching this population. This study seeks to comprehensively evaluate a set of recruitment strategies to enroll Latino, Asian and African American older adults with symptoms of depression and anxiety during the first year of a randomized clinical trial. A partnership of three academic sites across the U.S. (NYC, MA and PR) involving several collaborations with community agencies recruited racial/ethnic minority older adults using different strategies involving bilingual interviewers calling from hospital research dataset and community agencies’ list of clients, referrals from primary care providers or psychotherapy waitlist. In this presentation we will report various recruitment and retention data including individual and organizational predictors of successful recruitment as well as challenges across all three sites.