Attendance Clinical Trial
Official title:
Health Call: A Randomized Control Trial of Interactive Automated Reminder Calls to Reduce Failure to Attend Rates at an Urban Referral Hospital in Chile
Missed health care appointments present a serious challenge to patient care. Especially in
government funded health systems like that of Chile, missed appointments can lead to delayed
care, wasted resources, and escalating costs.
This private-public-research collaboration seeks to provide a rigorous, practical evaluation
of a new patient reminder system, evaluate how health beliefs impact patient attendance, and
capture the potential for scaling up this or other health technology systems. Using a
mixed-methods approach this study will provide contextualized, triangulated analysis of
pediatric patient attendance in Chile.
The Health Call study is divided into two phases. The first phase is a randomized controlled
trial and side-by- side cost-benefit analysis. Enrolled guardians of pediatric patients will
complete a questionnaire at the point of referral and then be randomized to intervention,
the automated reminder system, or no reminder. The investigators will then monitor
attendance status at their subsequent appointment and evaluate whether the appointment
reminders affected attendance as well as the cost-benefit ratio of using the reminder
system.
The second phase will involve interviewing guardians and healthcare professionals. These
interviews have two foci. First, combined with patient, guardian, and/or household data from
the randomized trial, these results will be used to develop a more comprehensive
understanding of why pediatric patients attend appointments. The second focus is on
improving the reminder system and developing new health technology interventions that can
increase patient attendance.
;
Allocation: Randomized, Endpoint Classification: Efficacy Study, Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment, Masking: Single Blind (Investigator), Primary Purpose: Health Services Research