NCT05189080

Twilio Well-Child Visit Pilot Open Trial

Text Message Follow-up for Patients Who Have Missed Well-Child Visits: Open Trial

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 500 (actual)
• Sponsor: Wake Forest University Health Sciences · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

This project will use Twilio as a platform for a text messaging campaign to implement timely follow up with parents/guardians of children ages 0 to 17 years who have no-showed for WCVs. The first phase of the study will be an open trial to assess feasibility and acceptability of three different reminder messages, analyze preliminary data, and collect feedback from participants using interviews to identify the top one or two performing messages. Each reminder message will at minimum direct parents/guardians to reschedule by phone or by the patient portal. These findings will be used to conduct the second phase of the study, a randomized controlled trial.

Detailed description

Well-Child visits (WCV) are an opportunity to maximize the health and future well-being and development of children. Missed visits, however, can result in negative outcomes for patients and families and for the healthcare system. For patients, missed primary care visits can result in greater Emergency Department (ED) visits and hospitalizations, and in delays in diagnosing a variety of medical conditions, including identification of child abuse and neglect. For healthcare systems, missed visits result in decreased efficiency, lower quality measures, decreased provider productivity, and loss in revenue. Although smart phones are nearly ubiquitous, even among more economically disadvantaged populations, literature to date has reported only on using text messages for pre-visit reminders. There is a tremendous opportunity to study use of text messaging to engage families in follow-up for missed WCV. Even more so, testing the use of text messages with different content is missing, as well as using text messages to invite patients to share reasons for missing the last WCV.

Conditions

• Child Health
• Text Messaging

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Text message reminders	Text messages will be sent to parents/guardians of children ages 0 to 17 years who no-showed for their well child visits.
OTHER	Interviews	Interviews will be conducted with a subset of participants to identify the top one or two performing text messages.
OTHER	Survey	Alongside notification text messages regarding no-showed visits, participants will be invited to participate in a survey about their experience with the health system. This survey will assess reasons for missing the WCV and primary caregiver's perspective on the experience at the prior visit.

Timeline

• Start date: 2021-12-17
• Primary completion: 2022-04-08
• Completion: 2022-04-08
• First posted: 2022-01-12
• Last updated: 2022-07-06

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States