Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Add topic to email alerts Receive an email when new articles are posted on Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on . ” data-action=subscribe> Subscribe We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com. Back to Healio Key takeaways: Patients in an automated text messaging cohort returned FIT kits for CRC screening more often than those in a phone call cohort. Researchers noted no differences by age, sex, race or ethnicity. A text message reminder-based strategy significantly improved colorectal cancer screening rates among adults in underserved communities, compared with nurse-led telephone call outreach, according to study results. Findings from a quality-improvement randomized trial showed that automated messaging may be a more effective and lower cost strategy to increase fecal immunochemical test (FIT) completion. \u201cThis is really a universal phenomenon we are seeing with this switch from phone calls to text communication,\u201d Leora I. Horwitz, MD, MHS, director of the division of healthcare delivery science and professor of population health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told Healio. \u201cThe world is changing and some people avoid picking up the phone from unrecognized numbers, or even recognized numbers sometimes. It turns out telephone calls are not as effective as we would like.\u201d The study, conducted at eight federally qualified health centers in Brooklyn, New York, assessed FIT completion rates within 21 days of a patient\u2019s test order. Participants were divided into two cohorts: one assigned to receive three automated text message reminders (n = 649; 64.4% women; mean age, 56.4 years) and the other assigned to receive a single nurse-led telephone call reminder (n = 626; 63.6% women; mean age, 56.7 years). Patients in the text cohort received FIT completion reminders on days 2, 5 and 8, whereas those in the telephone group received a single phone call reminder on day 8. Participants had designated English, Spanish or Chinese as their preferred language and had not opted out of receiving texts. Data showed significantly higher FIT completion in the text cohort (58.9% vs. 49.8%), with an absolute difference of 9 percentage points (95% CI, 3.6-14.5). The researchers observed no differences between groups by age, sex, race\/ethnicity, or patient portal use. Healio spoke with Horwitz about the use of automated text messaging to improve patient outreach, the evolution of health care system communication and other projects. Healio: Colorectal cancer rates are rising at an alarming rate. How important is it to identify strategies like this that could increase screening for patients in underserved populations? Horwitz: Colorectal cancer in general is one of the least well-screened for cancers, and yet, the most treatable and preventable. Most screening is meh, frankly. I encourage it, but it is not great. But colorectal cancer screening is actually one of the few that really works, because you can remove polyps entirely when you find them. Colonoscopies are cancer-reducing and life-improving, but the procedure is not done nearly often enough, particularly for people in underserved populations. CRC screening with colonoscopy is expensive and intrusive. Patients have to take the day off, somebody has to go with them, they have to manage the prep. It can be a hassle. That\u2019s why FIT is a commonly used alternative \u2014 particularly in under-resourced areas \u2014 because you can avoid colonoscopy in patients whose results come back negative. Healio: Nearly 60% of patients in the text group completed FIT screening within 21 days, outperforming the phone call group by 9 percentage points. Did that result surprise you and should it prompt health systems to rethink how much staff time is dedicated to traditional outreach? Horwitz: We were pretty surprised for all kinds of reasons. For starters, we generally assume that a personalized conversation between two human beings is desirable and effective. That is the gold standard that we measure against. Conversely, texting can feel less personal or less helpful. It is entirely possible that the phone call was great for the people who answered the phone. What we saw in this study is very typical in that we could only reach about half the people. Some of that is because people are just busy and some people don\u2019t like to answer the phone. On the other hand, 95% of people got the text message. We designed the text message with a lot of behavioral science; we had a deadline and there was some social pressure of saying, \u2018Your doctor is waiting.\u2019 We had multiple reminders in the text cohort, which was great because we barely had the capacity to call everyone once, let alone two or three times. But we could send out three text messages easily. I grew up without a cell phone, but my kids grew up only with cell phones and texting. They find it almost intrusive and weird to have someone call them on the phone. It\u2019s just culturally strange for them. Of course, they\u2019re not the population we\u2019re trying to reach with this. We\u2019re trying to reach people like me who didn\u2019t grow up with cell phones, but that will change over time. Healio: What does this say about how patients want to engage with health systems in 2026? Horwitz: I think it\u2019s a good signal for us and we should learn from that. This was a project done with a pretty big group and some of our clinical staff were quite worried that our non-English speaking, older or immigrant populations might not respond well. So, we predefined subgroups to look at and found no differences at all. We want to make sure that things are equally effective in different groups, and, when they\u2019re not, we have to change our behavior accordingly. We did our best to make sure of that. We sent messages in Mandarin to our Chinese-speaking patients and we sent messages in Spanish to our Spanish-speaking patients, which is another reason phone calls are hard \u2014 you need someone who can speak all those<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2825,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsoniafawad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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