Pilot Trial Characteristics, Postpilot Design Modifications, and Feasibility of Full-Scale Trials

Ying, Xiangji; Ehrhardt, Stephan

doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.33642

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 41 publications

(79 reference statements)

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“…We recruited participants by taking a simple random sample of 200 patients from the 4446 eligible patients identified and sending them SMS text messages to the cell phone number included in the EHR. As there is no specific consensus on the sample size necessary to assess the feasibility of a pilot study, consistent with prior studies, we included 200 (~5% of the eligible population) patients [ 17 , 18 ].…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feasibility of Using Text Messaging to Identify and Assist Patients With Hypertension With Health-Related Social Needs: Cross-Sectional Study

Kormanis,

Quinones,

Obermiller

et al. 2024

JMIR Cardio

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Background Health-related social needs are associated with poor health outcomes, increased acute health care use, and impaired chronic disease management. Given these negative outcomes, an increasing number of national health care organizations have recommended that the health system screen and address unmet health-related social needs as a routine part of clinical care, but there are limited data on how to implement social needs screening in clinical settings to improve the management of chronic diseases such as hypertension. SMS text messaging could be an effective and efficient approach to screen patients; however, there are limited data on the feasibility of using it. Objective We conducted a cross-sectional study of patients with hypertension to determine the feasibility of using SMS text messaging to screen patients for unmet health-related social needs. Methods We randomly selected 200 patients (≥18 years) from 1 academic health system. Patients were included if they were seen at one of 17 primary care clinics that were part of the academic health system and located in Forsyth County, North Carolina. We limited the sample to patients seen in one of these clinics to provide tailored information about local community-based resources. To ensure that the participants were still patients within the clinic, we only included those who had a visit in the previous 3 months. The SMS text message included a link to 6 questions regarding food, housing, and transportation. Patients who screened positive and were interested received a subsequent message with information about local resources. We assessed the proportion of patients who completed the questions. We also evaluated for the differences in the demographics between patients who completed the questions and those who did not using bivariate analyses. Results Of the 200 patients, the majority were female (n=109, 54.5%), non-Hispanic White (n=114, 57.0%), and received commercial insurance (n=105, 52.5%). There were no significant differences in demographics between the 4446 patients who were eligible and the 200 randomly selected patients. Of the 200 patients included, the SMS text message was unable to be delivered to 9 (4.5%) patients and 17 (8.5%) completed the social needs questionnaire. We did not observe a significant difference in the demographic characteristics of patients who did versus did not complete the questionnaire. Of the 17, a total of 5 (29.4%) reported at least 1 unmet need, but only 2 chose to receive resource information. Conclusions We found that only 8.5% (n=17) of patients completed a SMS text message–based health-related social needs questionnaire. SMS text messaging may not be feasible as a single modality to screen patients in this population. Future research should evaluate if SMS text message–based social needs screening is feasible in other populations or effective when paired with other screening modalities.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%