Research

We study how reminding high-risk patients of their upcoming preventative, primary care appointments impacts health behaviors. We use a natural experiment in Chile, where text-message appointment reminders were scaled up nation-wide over three years at public, primary care clinics. Our data come from national medical, medication, hospitalization, and mortality records and include over 300,000 patients, all recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and/or hypertension. We find that nudging patients to attend their preventative care appointments increases visits by 5 to 7%, results that are about half as large as published smaller-scale or efficacy trials. Our results increase to 9 to 11% after taking clinic-level compliance into account, where on average 53% of eligible patients were sent text-message reminders. This increase in primary care utilization translates into an 11% increase in health screening. Reminders also lead to a 42% improvement in anti-hypertensive medication adherence, which is largely attributed to patients having any active prescription. Last, SMS reminders lead to a 17% increase in cardiovascular hospitalizations coupled with a reduction in in-hospital mortality, suggesting an increase in referrals through primary care or timely care-seeking behavior of emergency and specialized health services. Our findings are particularly important for settings with a gate-keeping healthcare model, which is common in OECD countries. In this type of system, patients must first visit their primary care provider before being approved for tests, prescribed medication, or referred to speciality and hospital care. This paper shows that through intervening at the first step in the cascade of care, even a light touch intervention such as text-message reminders can have large and meaningful downstream impacts.

When a decision maker has discretion, such as a worker reporting their taxable income, threshold-based rules or policies can distort behavior. This has not been studied in the context of medicine where thresholds guide many important diagnosis and treatment decisions. I study the decision to diagnose and treat hypertension, defined as blood pressure of at least 140/90 mmHg. Hypertension is the single most important risk factor for cardiovascular disease, but diagnosis can be challenging because blood pressure is a noisy measure of risk and often overstated in clinic. Using bunching estimation and electronic health records from over 600,000 patients in Chile I find that providers round the blood pressure of up to 62% of patients who test near the threshold, using their discretion to turn a positive test for hypertension into a negative. This behavioral response leads to a more accurate classification of patients in terms of their cardiovascular risk, as measured by future hospitalizations. I find that discretionary decisions are consistent with heuristic thinking: among patients with identical test results, those with characteristics representative of high cardiovascular risk are less likely to be sorted below the diagnostic threshold. These results suggest that in the case of limited information, heuristic thinking and discretionary diagnosis can lead to more accurate decisions and to better patient outcomes, underscoring the importance of clinical skill in achieving an efficient and equitable allocation of health care.

Private sector engagement in health reform has been suggested to help reduce healthcare inequities in Sub-Saharan Africa, where populations with the most need seek the least care. We study the simultaneous supply- and demand-side effects of African Health Markets for Equity (AHME), a randomized management intervention that aimed to improve the quality and accessibility of private-sector clinics in Kenya. AHME focused on access to social health insurance, where the government is the payer, as a mechanism to increase the use of affordable, high-quality private care by individuals from lower wealth quintiles. The program was successful at increasing the share of clinics accepting and the share of households enrolled in social health insurance and in turn, the share of clinics' clients from lower wealth quintiles. Efforts to reduce the cost of care must also ensure that the quality of care is maintained. We conducted novel standardized patient (SP) experiments to measure the causal impact of a client not being able to afford full services on quality of care. SPs presented as poor by telling the provider they could only afford KSH 300 in fees. When faced with a client's budget constraint we found that providers reduced the quantity of both necessary and unnecessary care, resulting in lower quality of care for ‘poor' clients compared to non-poor clients. While public insurance is a promising mechanism to connect low-income households to private care, more work must be done to ensure clients of all wealth levels receive high quality care

Physical education (PE) is used to promote physical activity but has demonstrated limited success in affecting health behaviors and health outcomes among youth. We study the effectiveness of a state-level policy that sought to increase the intensity of PE by requiring at least 50% of high school PE time to be moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Using a synthetic difference-in-differences design and nine waves of Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, we find this policy had no overall effect on students' physical activity levels or obesity, and reduced PE participation. The selection out of PE is larger among older students and in settings where PE is not required. Among older students in voluntary enrollment settings, non-White students were most likely to reduce their participation in PE despite being more likely to benefit. We conclude that school-based PE policies targeting the intensive margin risk unintended consequences on the extensive margin when enrollment is voluntary.

We use standardized patients to study the effects of a patient demanding one of two possible inappropriate medicines, as examples of trade-offs providers might make between risks, profits, and patient satisfaction. At private clinics in Kenya, demanding a deworming medicine significantly increased its rate of dispensing to 35% (95% CI: 25-44) compared to 3% (95% CI: 0-7) without demanding. Demanding an antibiotic did not change its probability of dispensing. These results show private providers appear to account for both business-driven benefits and individual health impacts when making prescribing decisions.

Missed clinic appointments or no-shows burden health care systems through inefficient use of staff time and resources. Scheduling software combined with automatically sent appointment reminders shows promise to improve clinics’ management through timely cancellations and re-scheduling, but at-scale evidence is missing. We study a nationwide text message appointment reminder program in Chile implemented at primary care clinics for patients with chronic disease. Using longitudinal clinic-level data, we find that the program did not change the number of visits by chronic patients eligible to receive the reminder, but visits from other patients ineligible to receive reminders increased by 5.0% in the first year and 7.4% in the second. Clinics treating more chronic patients and those with a relatively younger patient population benefited more from the program. Scheduling systems combined with automatic appointment reminders were effective in increasing clinics’ ability to care for more patients, likely due to timely cancellations and re-scheduling.

Background: Social distancing and stay-at-home orders are critical interventions to slow down person-to-person transmission of COVID-19. While these societal changes help to contain the pandemic, they also have unintended negative consequences, including anxiety and depression. We developed StayWell, a daily skills-based SMS text messaging program, to mitigate COVID-19 related depression and anxiety symptoms among people who speak English and Spanish in the United States.

Objective: This paper describes the changes in the anxiety and depression levels of participants in the StayWell program after 60 days of exposure to skills-based SMS text messages.

Methods: We used self-administered, empirically supported web-based questionnaires to assess the demographic and clinical characteristics of StayWell participants. Anxiety and depression were measured using the 2-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-2) scale and the 8-item Patient Health Quesstionanire-8 (PHQ-8) scale at baseline and 60-day timepoints. We used paired t-tests to detect the change in PHQ-8 and GAD-2 scores from baseline to follow-up measured 60 days later.

Results: The analytic sample includes 193 participants who completed both the baseline and 60-day exit questionnaires. At the 60-day time point, there were statistically significant reductions in both PHQ-8 and GAD-2 scores from baseline. We found an average reduction of -1.72 (95% CI: -2.35, -1.09) in PHQ-8 scores and -0.48 (95% CI: -0.71, -0.25) in GAD-2 scores. This translated to an 18.5% and 17.2% reduction in mean PHQ-8 scores and GAD-2, respectively.

Conclusions: StayWell is a low-intensity, cost-effective, and accessible population-level mental health intervention. Participation in StayWell focused on COVID-19 mental health coping skills and was related to improved depression and anxiety symptoms. In addition to improvements in outcomes, we found high levels of engagement during the 60-day intervention period. Text messaging interventions could serve as an important public health tool for disseminating strategies to manage mental health. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT04473599

Background: Indigenous peoples worldwide carry a disproportionate tuberculosis burden. There is an increasing awareness of the effect of social determinants and proximate determinants such as alcohol use, overcrowding, type 1 and type 2 diabetes, substance misuse, HIV, food insecurity and malnutrition, and smoking on the burden of tuberculosis. We aimed to understand the potential contribution of such determinants to tuberculosis in Indigenous peoples and to document steps taken to address them.

Methods: We did a systematic review using seven databases (MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, Global Health, BIOSIS Previews, Web of Science, and the Cochrane Library). We identified English language articles published from Jan 1, 1980, to Dec 20, 2017, reporting the prevalence of proximate determinants of tuberculosis and preventive programmes targeting these determinants in Indigenous communities worldwide. We included any randomised controlled trials, controlled studies, cohort studies, cross-sectional studies, case reports, and qualitative research. Exclusion criteria were articles in languages other than English, full text not available, population was not Indigenous, focused exclusively on children or older people, and studies that focused on pharmacological interventions.

Findings: Of 34 255 articles identified, 475 were eligible for inclusion. Most studies confirmed a higher prevalence of proximate determinants in Indigenous communities than in the general population. Diabetes was more frequent in Indigenous communities within high-income countries versus in low-income countries. The prevalence of alcohol use was generally similar to that among non-Indigenous groups, although patterns of drinking often differed. Smoking prevalence and smokeless tobacco consumption were commonly higher in Indigenous groups than in non-Indigenous groups. Food insecurity was highly prevalent in most Indigenous communities evaluated. Substance use was more frequent in Indigenous inhabitants of high-income countries than of low-income countries, with wide variation across Indigenous communities. The literature pertaining to HIV, crowding, and housing conditions among Indigenous peoples was too scant to draw firm conclusions. Preventive programmes that are culturally appropriate targeting these determinants appear feasible, although their effectiveness is largely unproven.

Interpretation: Indigenous peoples were generally reported to have a higher prevalence of several proximate determinants of tuberculosis than non-Indigenous peoples, with wide variation across Indigenous communities. These findings emphasise the need for community-led, culturally appropriate strategies to address smoking, food insecurity, and diabetes in Indigenous populations as important public health goals in their own right, and also to reduce the burden of tuberculosis.

Funding: Canadian Institutes of Health Research.