Population-Based Digital Health Interventions to Deliver at-Home COVID-19 Testing: SCALE-UP II Randomized Clinical Trial.

Background: Digital health interventions could be a scalable approach to delivering at-home COVID-19 testing.

Objective: SCALE-UP II aimed to investigate the effectiveness of 3 digital health interventions on the delivery of mailed at-home COVID-19 testing: SMS text messaging, automated chatbot, and patient navigation upon request.

Methods: The study was a pragmatic randomized controlled trial. Participants who self-reported that they had a smartphone were randomized in a 2×2×2 factorial design (smartphone study) to receive (1) chatbot or text messaging, (2) the option to request patient navigation, and (3) intervention frequency every 10 or 30 days. All other participants were randomized in a 2×2 factorial design (nonsmartphone study) to receive the option to request patient navigation and intervention frequency every 10 or 30 days. Study settings were safety net community health centers located across the state of Utah, United States. Eligible patients were >18 years old, with a primary care visit in the last 3 years, and a valid cellphone in the community health centers electronic health record. The primary outcome was the proportion of participants requesting at-home COVID-19 tests.

Results: The trial enrolled 2117 in the smartphone study and 31,439 in the nonsmartphone study. In the smartphone study, the proportion of participants who requested test kits in the Chatbot arm was lower than in SMS text messaging (174/1051, 16.6% vs 555/1066, 52.1%; adjusted risk ratio (aRR) 0.317, 98.33% CI 0.27-0.38; P<.001). In the nonsmartphone study, the proportion of participants who requested test kits was higher if they were messaged every 10 days rather than every 30 days (860/15,717, 5.5% vs 752/15,722, 4.8%; aRR 1.144, 97.5% CI 1.03-1.28; P=.005). However, participants in the 10-day versus 30-day condition were more likely to opt out of receiving study interventions (1977/15,717, 12.6% vs 1147/15,722, 7.3%; aRR 1.72, 97.5% CI 1.59-1.86; P<.001). In the nonsmartphone study, the proportion of participants who requested test kits was lower for those in the patient navigation condition compared with no patient navigation (680/15,718, 4.3% vs 932/15,721, 5.9%; aRR 0.729, 97.5% CI 0.65-0.81; P<.001).

Conclusions: Simple bidirectional text messaging was more effective than an interactive web-based chatbot on the delivery of COVID-19 testing. Although messaging every 10 days was more effective than every 30 days, it also led to a larger opt-out rate. Digital health interventions based on automated bidirectional SMS text messaging are a simple, scalable, and low-cost strategy to offer access to at-home COVID-19 testing. Similar approaches may be used to support public health response and other forms of at-home testing.