Electronically-Delivered Push Notifications Improve Patient Adherence to Preventive Care

Background: Preventive care improves patient health and is cost-effective, yet many patients are not up to date on recommended screenings.

Objective: Evaluate the effectiveness of an automated system for outreach to patients in need of annual preventive examinations, cervical cancer screening, and diabetes monitoring labs.

Methods: As part of a quality improvement project, we created a population health algorithm and outreach system which was designed to send e-mail and smartphone notifications to patients overdue for preventive services. The study was a cohort study, with a matched control sample. We compared completion of preventive exams and screenings between the 2 groups, in the 4 weeks following the outreach.

Results: For annual preventive visits, the intervention group had 9.0% more visits (95%CI: 8.2 to 9.7) than the control group. For cervical cancer screening, the intervention group had 3.2% (95%CI: 2.0% - 4.4%) more visits. Lab action orders for diabetes showed the largest increases. The intervention group had 5.2% (2.5% - 7.9%) more patients get bloodwork and 20.8% (16.9% - 24.6%) get more urine microalbumin tests.

Conclusions: A population health outreach system that used reminders for prevention resulted in patients completing appointments for necessary medical services. Such a system, when deployed more broadly could help close care gaps and improve health for people that are asymptomatic but are due for preventive screenings.