Electronically-Delivered Push Notifications Improve Patient Adherence to Preventive Care

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

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

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.

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.

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.