Mobile phone technologies improve adherence to antiretroviral treatment in a resource-limited setting: a randomized controlled trial of text message reminders
By Cristian Pop-Eleches, H. Thirumurthy, James Habyarimana, Joshua Graff Zivin, Markus Goldstein, D. de Walque, Leslie MacKeen, J. Haberer, S. Kimaiyo, J. Sidle and 2 more. AIDS (London), 2011
905 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Objective:There is limited evidence on whether growing mobile phone availability in sub-Saharan Africa can be used to promote high adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART). This study tested the efficacy of short message service (SMS) reminders on adherence to ART among patients attending a rural clinic in Kenya. Design:A randomized controlled trial of four SMS reminder interventions with 48 weeks of follow-up. Methods:Four hundred and thirty-one adult patients who had initiated ART within 3 months were enrolled and randomly assigned to a control group or one of the four intervention groups. Participants in the intervention groups received SMS reminders that were either short or long and sent at a daily or weekly frequency. Adherence was measured using the medication event monitoring system. The primary outcome was whether adherence exceeded 90% during each 12-week period of analysis and the 48-week study period. The secondary outcome was whether there were treatment interruptions lasting at least 48 h. Results:In intention-to-treat analysis, 53% of participants receiving weekly SMS reminders achieved adherence of at least 90% during the 48 weeks of the study, compared with 40% of participants in the control group (P = 0.03). Participants in groups receiving weekly reminders were also significantly less likely to experience treatment interruptions exceeding 48 h during the 48-week follow-up period than participants in the control group (81 vs. 90%, P = 0.03). Conclusion:These results suggest that SMS reminders may be an important tool to achieve optimal treatment response in resource-limited settings.
Subfields: General Health Professions, Infectious Diseases, Information Systems
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bf291fda7fb41e51a998fbe56a4707671aca2fdf
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Citations in the corpus
- Scaling Up mHealth: Where Is the Evidence? (2013, background): “Three randomized trials studying HIV treatment adherence found benefits [19,20] and one found no impact [21,22].”
- How smartphones are changing the face of mobile and participatory healthcare: an overview, with example from eCAALYX (2011, neutral): “Studies assessing specific functionalities of smartphones have recently featured in the literature, including an examination of the use of on-board digital diaries in symptom research [17], the use of short message service (SMS) text in the management of behaviour change [18], in sexual health educa”
- Systematic review on what works, what does not work and why of implementation of mobile health (mHealth) projects in Africa (2014, background): “airtime credit) allows high response rate to the project [21,22] -Costs and logistics affect text messaging responding on time [14,33,61] -Reporting transparency for donors and stakeholders [37]”
- Mapping mHealth Research: A Decade of Evolution (2013, background): “The final sample for the full-text review included 117 [17-133] articles out of the 352 described above.”
- The effectiveness of interventions using electronic reminders to improve adherence to chronic medication: a systematic review of the literature (2012, neutral): “37 40 Of the three studies that included more than 50 patients in each arm, one study reported significant effects.(29)”
- Mobile Health (mHealth) Approaches and Lessons for Increased Performance and Retention of Community Health Workers in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Review (2013, background): “Treatment adherence was improved for patients receiving weekly, but not daily, SMS and treatment interruptions were less likely [29].”
- The Effectiveness of Mobile-Health Technology-Based Health Behaviour Change or Disease Management Interventions for Health Care Consumers: A Systematic Review (2013, neutral): “Secondary outcomes were as follows: Three trials reported statistically significant increases in adherence to antiretroviral medication with text message reminders [81–83], and one trial reported increases in adherence that were not statistically significant [84].”