A pilot study on the use of a smartphone application to encourage emergency department patients to access preventive services: human papillomavirus vaccine as an example

Abstract

Background: In General, emergency department (ED) personnel are expert in providing episodic care and are usually too busy to attend to patients' need for preventive care. This is the case in the area of administering vaccines particularly when the vaccine protocol requires multiple injections over several months. However, ED personnel recognize the importance of patients receiving preventive services. A possible way for ED personnel to direct patients to prevention services is to use smartphone apps. A pilot study was designed to explore the possibility of using an app to foster the receipt of human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine. Methods: Women who met the inclusion criteria of (1) Self-identified as African-American, (2) owned a smartphone, and (3) had been cleared for discharge from the ED were recruited to a study to determine their willingness to use a smartphone app with regard to the receipt of the HPV vaccine. They completed a 30 item questionnaire that included questions about demographics, smartphone based questions, HPV knowledge based questions and perception based variables dealing with the acceptability of HPV. Results: Nine of the 19 respondents were willing to participate in a study that would use a smartphone app dealing with HPV. Willingness to participate was significantly related to: 1) participants having health insurance and 2) comfort with HPV messages on a personal phone 3) perceived availability of the HPV vaccine and 4) comfort with an STI smartphone app on their mobile phones. Conclusions: While there is a need for additional research in this area, this pilot study suggest the potential for using smartphones to link ED patients to preventive services. If smartphones lead to additional uptake of vaccines, there is the potential of improving the public's health in other areas of vaccine preventable diseases such as measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), Hepatitis A and B, and influenza vaccines.

Novel Use of Video Logs to Deliver Educational Interventions to Black Women for Disease Prevention

“…4 The ED is an ideal clinical environment for brief interventions that promote sexual health because it offers flexibility during wait times for nonemergent conditions to engage at-risk populations and link patients to primary prevention strategies that promote health. 14,15,[26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34] We pilottested an intervention approach in the ED using vlogging to deliver a brief educational strategy to Black women aimed at increasing their knowledge of how HIV/STIs are transmitted. Pilot study findings support a future prevention intervention aimed at promoting sexual health.…”

Pilot testing the effectiveness of whether a survey-driven tablet-based intervention increased willingness of Black women to attend to an initial PrEP clinic visit: The protocol for the pilot randomized controlled trial design and methods

“…Using a conservative estimate of recruiting two participants a week, Monday - Friday, the recruitment aspect of this study is estimated to last approximately five months. We established the feasibility of obtaining a sufficient sample of cisgender Black women with this recruitment approach from the ED [ [24] , [25] , [26] , [27] , [28] ] in prior studies; we achieved 100% of our planned accrual of cisgender women at both EDs. Thus, we estimate that recruitment of 40 cisgender Black women over a 12-month recruitment period is feasible.…”

Communicating Care : The Contradictions of HPV Vaccination Campaigns

“…That is, I try to take their realities/worlds seriously, and what these allow me to see, say and do. empirical part i reaching the girls Health promoters envision smartphone apps as promising devices for reaching teenagers "where they are" (Lefebvre 2009;Levine 2011;Ralph et al 2011) with "accurate" and "good" HPV vaccination information (Hill et al 2013;Zimet et al 2013). The HPV app is an example of such a device used to provide information to girls.…”